Here’s a pair of words that have diverged in meaning: “awful” and “awesome.” When you say something is “awful,” you mean it’s bad. I’m not going out today; the weather is awful. But “awesome” is good. Let’s go out and enjoy the awesome weather.
Of the two words, “awful” is the older one, dating back to Old English. “Awesome” is older than you might think, but only appeared around the 1500s. Both words are variations on “awe,” which means reverence, originally in a religious sense. “Awful” was used even in Old English to also mean a feeling of fear based on reverence; one might be frightened AND reverential about godlike power, for example, or even great and respected military power. There’s a translation from somewhere around 900 in which King Alfred refers to the “name of the Romans” as very awful to many folk.
“Awesome” originally meant nearly the same thing; full of awe or reverence. It would have been used to describe, for example, a person as “awesome” when they felt awe, as in Sally was awesome when she visited the grand cathedral. By the 1600s its meaning shifted a bit from “feeling awe” to “inspiring awe” — so if Sally’s great-granddaughter Betsy visited the same cathedral and also had a feeling of awe, ithe cathedral would have been called “awesome” instead of Betsy herself.
Awesome and awful continued to have these same meanings until the early 1800s when “awful” began to be used to mean “very bad.” The first instance of this is by Thomas Fessenden, a journalist in 1809, who wrote I fear our…nation is in an awful situation. Journalists have been writing stuff like that ever since. “Awesome,” though, continued to mean “inspiring awe” for another couple of centuries until the 1960s. It began to be used to mean “remarkable,” as in that’s an awesome new album by The Rolling Stones. It would have been used in exactly that way because young people were the ones who started using it. Since the 1960s the word has been used much more frequently than in the past, and it was even included in The Official Preppy Handbook in 1979. If you go by today’s Urban Dictionary, the meaning has recently shifted a little to mean not just remarkable but wonderful. At the same time, of course, it’s frequently used ironically or sarcastically to mean, in context, anything but remarkable or wonderful.
“Awful,” though, has simply carried on with the meaning it acquired in the 1800s; it still mostly means something bad. Except when it’s used as an adjective (awfully), it can be an intensifier too. I feel awfully can mean you’re sick, but I feel awfully good means you feel particularly well.
It’s possible these shifts in meaning go deeper than just language; while you have the sense that back a few centuries it was pretty common for people to have a feeling of awe, it seems like nowadays that sort of feeling is unusual. Maybe we’ve just all become jaded. Wait…jaded?? Feeling Iike a green rock? That sounds awful!
