Great: A Huge, Meaningless, Important Word

Great: a huge, meaningless, important word.
Did you have a great time?
Well, to a degree, the word great always does, at least in terms of volume. Internet headlines usually discuss great controversies, ways to be a great listener a great writer, great-fathers, great dicoveries, the world’s great wonders, the Great Wall of China, the Great Pretender, the Great depression, and, of course, the world famous new slogan of president Donald Trump:“Make America Great Again.”

Few things in life gets my blood to boil but one of them is the use of the "Great" and another one is the word 'Awesome" both of which have become gigantic, meaningless, words plugged into comment slots, i.e. Great picture! Great post!, because you just know that the informative,

With that broad range of uses, great can feel a bit meaningless. A word that first applied to enormous things, then things with enormous importance, may have hit bottom when it was used in a famous slogan to describe Frosted Flakes. But though you may take greatness for granted, great is a word with a long, complex history that could never be summed up in a few words by a cartoon tiger or presidential candidate.

In fact, if you printed the Oxford English Dictionary’s entire entry on great, it would be over 100 pages. Great has West Germanic roots and has been around since the days of Old English. The overall journey of great is about bigness: physical, then metaphorical. This movement is common for adjectives. Anne Curzan, Arthur F. Thurnau professor of English at the University of Michigan and regular contributor to the Lingua Franca blog, said in an e-mail that huge is making a similar shift: “Now you will hear, in informal usage, huge used to refer to something very important or really good in terms of its overall value — for example, ‘That win was huge!’ ” Over the centuries, great set that standard for that kind of