Why Is Everything Either Awesome or Amazing?

A thousand years from now, historians, cultural anthropologists and linguists will look back on the beginning of this millennium and wonder about a curiously strange phenomenon: what happened to adjectives? Or at least, what happened to all but two of them?

Every person, every place, every food, every experience and every thought came to be described as either amazing or awesome. The coffee. The commute. The quarterly report. The dog. The sunset. The sandwich. Two words, doing the work of thousands.

That is the question Eli Amdur takes up in Episode 23 of Vantage Point, and it is not a grammarian’s complaint. It is a career question, a thinking question, and, as you will see, a question that gets more consequential the more we hand our words over to machines.

A Language That Almost Died, and What We’re Doing With It

English began the second millennium nearly extinct. It is now spoken by close to half the people on earth. It is the global language of business and of science. And it has more ways to say any one thing than any other language ever assembled: more synonyms, more shades, more precision available to anyone willing to reach for it.

That is the inheritance. And Eli’s lament in this episode is watching that inheritance reduced to a binary choice. Not because language shouldn’t evolve, it always has and always will, but because this particular evolution runs in the wrong direction. It is a contraction, not a growth. We have been handed the richest vocabulary on earth and we are using roughly two percent of it to express enthusiasm.

Calling everything amazing or awesome is lazy. It is inexact. It is hyperbolic. And eventually, inevitably, it is boring. When every single thing is amazing, the word stops carrying information. It becomes a sound you make to indicate you are still in the conversation.

Communication Is the King of Soft Skills

Here is where the episode turns from culture to career, and where the stakes get real.

As a career coach, a public speaker, a journalist, and for 15 years a professor of executive communication and leadership at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Eli has seen one premise hold without exception:

“Communication is the king of soft skills, and by far and away, more valuable than any hard skills, with no exceptions.”

Consider what executives actually complain about. They can find all the accountants, chemists and engineers they want. The talent pipelines for hard skills are crowded and well mapped. What keeps leaders up at night is finding people who know how to talk to each other. People who can run a meeting that accomplishes something. People who can explain a complex idea to someone who doesn’t share their training. People who can articulate their own value without a script.

Recruiters feel it from the other side. Ask any experienced recruiter what disqualifies an otherwise strong candidate and the answer lands on communication with striking regularity. Not knowledge. Not credentials. The inability to say clearly what you know and what you would do with it.

Eli’s example from the episode is one worth sitting with. A staffing recruiter pitching a client, with nothing more to offer than this: an amazing company with an awesome office. That is the whole pitch. No industry. No culture. No trajectory. No reason a thinking person would move their family and their career. Two adjectives standing in for research, judgment and preparation.

If you cannot express yourself better than that, you will run into a brick wall in your career, and usually before you realize you did. That is the hard part. Nobody sends a memo explaining that you were passed over because you couldn’t make your case. The door simply doesn’t open, and you are left wondering why.

And double the stakes when you throw AI into the mix. When fluent, serviceable, average prose is suddenly free and infinite, the premium on genuine precision goes up, not down.

So What Actually Deserves the Words?

The point is not to retire these two words. It is to earn them. Eli offers his own list, and it is a useful calibration exercise.

Awesome, properly used, means something that fills you with awe. Niagara Falls. The tides in the Bay of Fundy. Mont Saint-Michel rising out of the water. Beethoven’s Ninth. An eight-hour Grateful Dead show at the Fillmore East.

Amazing means something that genuinely amazes, that exceeds what you believed possible. Katie Ledecky in the pool. E equals MC squared. The kids who win spelling bees on words most of us can’t spell, let alone define.

A pizza, even the best one you have ever had, is just good. It may be excellent. It may be superb, memorable, perfect for a Friday night. It is not awesome. And the moment you make that distinction, you have told your listener something real.

That is the whole argument in miniature. Precision is not fussiness. Precision is respect, for the thing being described and for the person you are describing it to.

From Great Minds and Big Hearts: Eleanor Roosevelt

Recorded on October 11, her birthday, this episode’s tribute goes to Eleanor Roosevelt. Eli asks a question perfectly suited to our era of name, image and likeness: where does Eleanor Roosevelt’s NIL belong today?

His answer: back on a stamp. On the $20 bill. And on more bridges, roadways and airports, because she was not only a great mind, she had a great heart too. The segment makes the case for why both halves of that sentence matter, and why her kind of public character is in short supply.

Her words, which make the case better than any summary can:

“If life were predictable, it would cease to be life.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

Two Aphorisms Worth Keeping

The episode closes with a pair of Eli’s own lines, offered without elaboration and better for it.

“Problems are really opportunities poorly dressed.”

“The first person to live to 150 has already been born, so don’t make decisions lightly. You’ll live with them for a very long time.”

Read those two together and you have a quiet argument for taking your own thinking seriously. A longer life means a longer time living inside the decisions you make casually today.

The Mind Stretcher

This time Eli calls it the Mind Stretcher, and hands it to Galileo Galilei: “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” Look at it optimistically, pessimistically, skeptically, humorously or empathetically, but one way or another, Galileo was right, and that, in part, is why this podcast exists.

The full quotation, as cited in the episode:

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended for us to forego their use.” — Galileo Galilei

Which brings us back to where we started. Words are the instruments of reason. Let them decay and the thinking decays with them. Sixteen minutes well spent, and the full episode includes more examples, more calibration, and the complete Eleanor Roosevelt tribute.

Listen

• 🎧 Episode page: https://eliamdur.com/awesome-or-amazing/
• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/vantage-point-with-eli-amdur/id1896926911
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Vantage Point – the podcast for critical thinkers. We’re not political, just critical.

This episode is supported by Vantage Point’s Executive Sponsor, Stephen Bozer, SVP of Human Health at Flavine. Also supported by Major Sponsor Bergen Volunteers, neighbors serving neighbors across 70 towns in Bergen County since 1966. Also supported by Major Sponsor Kardam Consulting, strategic counsel for the business of making medicine.