Recently a foreign exchange student from Sweden moved in with my family and I. English is her second language, and although she speaks excellently, some things just don't translate well. While explaining slang phrases such as "epic fail", I began to wonder about the nature of slang and how languages evolve over time.
One main thing that I noticed was that words like great, awesome, and epic have very positive modern meanings. They all signify that something is very good and tend to have positive connotations. If you read any older English literature, however, these words simply mean "quite large" and have neutral connotations.
This phenomenon strikes me as strange, and I have been trying to think of a valid explanation for it. One theory is that America is the land of "bigger and better" so maybe our language has started to reflect that. We always want bigger cars, bigger tvs, and bigger cheeseburgers.
Any theories?
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