Tim Grobaty: One woman's `awesome' may be a bit much

RELAX, IT'S JUST WATER: We were vacationing down in San Diego last week, because we're rich. You don't have a new book tickling the 50,000th position on the amazon.com sales ranking without a little coin rattling around in your pocket.

Anyhow, we wandered down one warm and pleasant spring day to the book shop in downtown San Diego's Seaport Village to see if they had our book prominently displayed which, to our bitter disappointment, they didn't. We were sort of setting ourself up for the blow because our book hadn't been released yet. Still, a pirated copy or two would've been nice to see.

Anyhow, while we were looking at other things in the store, a young woman was buying some pastries at the bookstore's bakery/coffee counter. There's no money in just selling books anymore. If you're going to have a successful book store, you need to have a world-class muffin department to help offset your losses. That, plus a bunch of gimcracks like funny coffee mugs and refrigerator-magnet poetry.

The woman stashed her purchase into an oversized straw basket and then remembered that she was thirsty.

"I forgot, I need to get a bottle of water," she told the bakery/book clerk. "I'll just pay cash for it."

She rummaged around for wherever it is she kept her cash and then said, "Actually, can I just get a cup of water?"

The book/baked goods business isn't so robust that a proprietor can chase off business by denying customers complimentary tap water, so the multipurpose worker said, "Yes I can do that."

The young woman said: "That would be awesome."

And this brings us to today's rant, which is all about how the Englitch language has been sacked and plundered to the point that all the superlatives have been watered down to the point where you don't even get a light buzz off them anymore.

There's no better example than the overuse of "awesome," a word once kept in a glass case to be issued forth to describe views of Earth as it rises over the moon's horizon and now used as a frilly substitute for "satisfactory."

Don't look at us. We have been parsimonious and judicious in our use of the term. We could only find two instances of us dragging the word into this space over the last year or two (although we were sort of hoping that a search box containing "grobaty" and "awesome" would result in a few more hits than that). One use of "awesome" referred to the talent drawn by the 49er Banjo, Fiddle & Guitar festivals held at Cal State Long Beach in the 1970s; the other was used to describe the momentum generated by Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle in the mythical Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach celebrity race in the 1930s. We think we're standing on solid-ish ground on those usages.

Nor are we saying a glass of water can't be an awesome thing. To a Sudanese refugee, a glass of cool, clear San Diego water is the stuff of dreams.

But to a lady sporting a madras blouse a shade darker than pastel, and a pair of jeans with a label we didn't catch and toting a Kate Spade bag a couple of seasons after the whole Kate Spade bag thing has sailed, and forgetting that she was thirsty until after she had purchased a sack of scones, setting the "awesome" bar at a cup of tap water leaves us bereft of any words to employ when referring to anything greater than that.

If a cup of San Diego water is "awesome," what sort of rhapsodies would be sung to the bottle of Metroelectro Micronutrient Water that stands like a little monument on our desk right now?

Actually, considering that we reuse the bottle and fill it up with tap water each day, we guess merely "awesome" will be satisfactory.


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