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Cambridge Dictionaries Online has announced three new words this month.
Did awesomesauce exist before, or was it invented out of whole cloth for the TV ad with the girl calling up support and getting her friend?
And that brings to mind two other questions:
1.) If advertising pays, you ought to be able to remember whose ad that was. Can you? I can't. Remember the ad, years ago where the guy opens the door of the medicine cabinet only to find that the back of the cabinet is another door, and his neighbor is there, pitching a product? The guy calls out to his wife, Mona, but what was the ad for?
2.) Isn't her friend commuting a long way, to be working phone support? She'd barely get home from Mumbai before she would have to head back for the next shift!
The other two words are "weak sauce", and "nothing burger".
The relationship between awesome sauce and weak sauce suggests one inspired the other. Did they originate with one of the many food porn shows on television, or did they come from "sauce for the goose"? When I tried to research these on the ngrams viewer, I got that exasperating "No valid ngrams to plot" error message.
Nothing burger seems to me a slightly less scatalogical for, of "shit sandwich" An ngrams search on that reveals an article in Mother Jones Magazine about 1981 observing that the more bread you have, the less shit you have to eat. It sounds like the observation of an earlier versio9n of Jerry Seinfeld, but I don't see credits anywhere. There's also a book from 1978 that points out life is a shit sandwich, and every day, you have to take another bite.
But I remember a cow orker named Mel who used to refer to shit sandwiches all the time, in regards to his manager at work. That would have been 1976 or possibly 1977. Which fits, I suppose, the notion that it originated with a standup comic. Did George Carlin come up with it? Not too many popular comics would have risked it, but George would have. Or maybe Mort Sahl. A lesser comic wouldn't have had the reach and frequency to give wings to the expression, would he?
Wouldn't tyhat be a wonderful epitaph to carve on someone's tombstone? "Invented the shit sandwich". What would you llike on yOUR Tombstone? I'd take sausage, green peppers and extra cheese!
deaconB said: The relationship between awesome sauce and weak sauce suggests one inspired the other. Did they originate with one of the many food porn shows on television, or did they come from “sauce for the goose”? When I tried to research these on the ngrams viewer, I got that exasperating “No valid ngrams to plot” error message.
It appears Google hasn't scanned any new material into their corpus beyond 2008. So those terms are probably too new for Ngrams. But if you Google "awesomesauce" you'll get over a million hits. It's in the Urban Dictionary and Online Slang Dictionary, but neither say much about the etymology.
Should I be capitalizing Google when I use it as a verb? 🙂
Heimhenge said
Should I be capitalizing Google when I use it as a verb? 🙂
No. Google is a trademark, but when you use it as a verb, you are using it as a synonym for "search", which is not trademarked. Thus, you would go to Google and google yourself.
Of course one doesn't actually go to a website. Our browsers fetch instructions from servers, and create webpages in the browsers, the web page not actually existing on the server. Kinda strange semantics, if one is as easily amused as I am.
And, since Google is now Alphabet, it's just going to get stranger for a while.
Check this for origin possibilities:
http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/awesome_sauce
Entry from May 11, 2011
Awesome Sauce An “awesome sauce” can be a very good sauce placed on food. The slang term “awesome sauce” describes someone or something “awesome,” with “sauce” added as an essential ingredient. The slang “awesome sauce” (or “awesome-sauce” or “awesomesauce") has been cited in print since at least September 2001. The origin is unknown, but the term “awesome sauce” was used in 2001 and in 2003 in the newsgroup for the sketch comedy group The Kids in the Hall.
My first exposure was:
2011 March 17, Daniel J. Goor, “Harvest Festival”, Parks and Recreation, Season 3, Episode 7:
April: Hey, I love you.
Andy: Dude, shut up! That is awesome sauce!
Cambridge is way behind Oxford on this word:
http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/27/living/oxford-web-dictionary-new-words-feat/
New words in the dictionary? Awesomesauce!
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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