They’re the two fall-back adjectives of the moment: awesome and amazing. I think of them as the new A-words. And if the world were full of people in a state of awe and amazement, I’d be fine with them. But it’s not.

I risk being totally ungracious here, since both words have been used on occasion with reference to me. I am grateful for the compliments, but really, I hardly inspire awe – at least I hope I don’t, since awe is as much terror as exhilaration. And I see nothing amazing in what I do, which consists of reading, thinking, writing, and speaking out. My problem is that however well-intended such compliments may be, both “awesome” and “amazing” have been so corrupted by over-use that there’s next to nothing either awesome or amazing left in them.

“Awesome” has spread so far up the age range from its origins in teen-speech that I find it hard to understand why newly minted teens still revert to it. When a freshly purchased pair of sandals or a new ice-cream flavor is called awesome, the word is worth about as much as the price of the cone the ice-cream’s served in. It has nothing to do with real awe — a state of being the speaker has clearly never experienced.

As for “amazing,” consider the way it’s said — in a tone of voice that no longer contains any hint of amazement, and with a downward inflection so that the speaker might just as well be saying “depressing.” This fake amazement has become an automatic response, in much the same realm as “Have a good day.”

I tested it not long ago at a gathering of well-connected millennials who prided themselves on what they took to be unconventional thinking, and whose standard conversation-starter was the utterly conventional “Where are you from?” At first I said Seattle, and this was deemed amazing, as though it were a surprise that anyone could possibly live in such a place. Then, just to check, I began to give other answers. Des Moines, I said. Or Detroit. Or – why not push it? – Dubai. And each answer got the same glassy-eyed response: that un-amazed “amazing.”

Scroll through the click-bait headlines of such sites as Gawker or Buzzfeed or The Huffington Post and you’ll find the A-words used ad nauseam (note to self: does ad nauseam count as an A-word?).  Playful bear cubs and science breakthroughs, inspirational talks and dumb pratfalls, see-through dresses and stars exploding in outer space — all are mashed together in a mini-tsunami of awesomeness, amazement, astonishment, astoundingness. The A-list, I guess.

In the face of so much amazement and awe, I find myself gasping for space in which to breathe, let alone think. I’d say let’s avoid the meaningless use of such words, but the go-to impulse remains strong, and I’m sure I’ll keep using them just like everyone else.

But I hope to stay faithful to my favorite A-word: absurd. And – how could I forget? – accidental.

People experience awe in very different ways. One person’s exhilarating glimpse of something infinitely grand can be another’s nightmare, to be denied, even exiled from consciousness.

This happened some years ago, before the ubiquity of smartphones.  It was dawn, the midsummer sun not yet risen, as I sailed with a friend out of Neah Bay, the small native American township at the northwest tip of the United States. I stood at the helm as my companion huddled over charts down in the cabin, plotting our course across the mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca where it opens up into the Pacific. The sea was cutting short and choppy as the incoming ocean swell came up against the outflow of the strait, but I was suffused with a feeling of calm. We were the only boat in sight, the only sounds the water against the hull and an occasional flap of the sail. The world, at that moment, was perfect. And then it became more so.

The sun began to rise over the mountains to the east – a large, fuzzy sun, the color of a white daffodil. Mesmerized by its slow ascent, I waited for the moment when it would detach itself from the mountain ridges and assume a perfect, independent roundness. Except it didn’t. Just when I expected to see clear sky between sun and mountains, there seemed instead to be something beneath the sun, pushing it upward, and I realized that there were now two suns rising — two suns of equal size, conjoined, one on top of the other. “A sun dog!” I shouted.

My friend came running up from below, took one look, and froze. “That shouldn’t be happening. That can’t be happening,” he shouted, adamantly refusing to believe the testimony of his own eyes. “That’s impossible!”

I tried to tell him that somewhere, some time, I had read an account of just such a twinned sunrise (in a novel? a short story? I’ve searched since, but never been able to find it again). But he’d have none of it. Instead, he scrambled down to the cabin to bring up an armful of meteorology books, and with his back resolutely set to the splendor of the sky behind him, started leafing frantically through them. “See!” he said, jabbing at a page. “It can’t be a sun dog. A sun dog is a parhelion, a much smaller mock sun, and they come in pairs, at an angle to the real sun. Not this… this abomination!”

Abomination?  I’d never expected to hear that biblical word from this eminently rational intellectual – a pastor’s son turned insistent atheist. “Can’t you see?” he wailed. “Something awful is happening, against all the laws of nature.” I’m not a hundred percent sure if he used the phrase “end of the world” — surely not, though it seems to me he did, and he trembled as though some form of apocalypse was in progress.

I admit I was no help. “Just look!” I kept saying. But he only dashed back down into the cabin for shelter from the sky, leaving me alone to watch as it became still more extraordinary. The lower sun assumed a deeper color and more definite form as it rose, and as the upper one faded, a thick pillar of white light took shape between the remaining sun – the real sun — and the mountaintops. It occurred to me that it may have been as well that my friend was below deck: a pillar of light was so damn biblical. And then that in turn gave way to a huge double rainbow in an ellipse around the risen sun, and I could only stand there shaking my head and laughing, tears in my eyes, knowing that I would never again witness a sunrise as stunningly eerie and beautiful and grand as this. Not even my companion’s panic could change that.

Long after that friendship’s inevitable dissolution, I occasionally searched meteorology sites online. My companion had been right in that most sun dogs are indeed much smaller images at an angle to the sun, but I did eventually find a couple of photographs of two suns, even if not quite conjoined, and horizontal rather than vertical.  I also found explanations of how the acutely angled light of the sun is refracted when layers of ice crystals form barely visible low-lying fog in the chill early-morning air, acting as a kind of mirror.  I could now explain how come I’d seen what I saw. And yet the explanation did nothing to diminish the splendor of the memory. Or the experience of pure wonder. Or the knowledge that what had delighted me, had terrified another.

In a provocative post on America’s faith in technology, Charles Mudede took off from my recent Obscenity in Black and Blue and soared with it.

This “great belief in technology” is not secular but closely linked with a great belief in American awesomeness…

The certainty of American awesomeness that led to the war in Iraq or to the current destruction of the Gulf of Mexico, has been rooted in one, politically powerful branch of American Christianity. And what has feed much of this overrepresented group’s tireless (and often comical) resistance to the hard facts of, say, Darwinism, has been the belief that American greatness cannot be separated from divine providence, from supernatural agency.

When Charles soars, I often feel like I’m in a tiny Piper Cub straining to get off the ground, but I love that he gets back to the real meaning of awesome — not just neat or cool, but full of awe.   Awe-inspiring. that is, as well as potentially awful/awe-full.  And he’s right:  that sense of awe is essentially religious.  That is, it’s faith-based.

Our conviction that technology has the answers — in this case, to cap the burst oil well under the Gulf — is now revealed as the article of faith it has always been.  One major impulse behind religious faith is to create a sense of order in the universe, and through order, control.  We are no longer hapless, meaningless, pawns of existence.  Faith might seem to be about humility, but more often, it’s the opposite.  Through faith, in whatever god, we aggrandize ourselves.  We assure ourselves of our meaningfulness, our purpose (as in that terrifyingly mechanistic idea of “the purpose-driven life”).   Faith puts us in control, gives us the illusion that we possess the key to it all.

Of course if we really thought technology invincible, we wouldn’t need faith in it.   So to suppress that awareness, we fetishize technology — we make it into a fetish, worshipped for its magical powers.   We take applied science and turn it into an article of  faith.  We think it all-powerful, invincible.  Until it isn’t.

You read this, obviously, courtesy of technology.  But remember when the screen crashes and you feel utterly vulnerable.  TDS — technology deprivation syndrome — kicks in.  You feel bereft, helpless, cut off from the omniscience and the omnipotence of the Web.   You’ve been dropped into a void.  Your god has failed.   Examine that feeling closer and I suspect it’s close to that of an addict suddenly cut off from his or her drug — and that the flood of relief when “service is restored” is very like the first hit of a restored supply of meth or heroin.  All memory of vulnerability vanishes.  Wheeeee…. we’re flying again.   Until the next crash.

We can hardly say our faith in oil companies has been shattered (though it would be nice, if absurdly naive, to think that their faith in themselves has).  Presumably the BP engineers who insisted on riskier, less expensive blowout-prevention procedures did so in full faith that they would work.  Well, make that partial faith.  They were playing the odds, and they knew it.  Always a dangerous thing to do when gods are concerned, especially when it’s you that’s trying to play God.

Did they never hear of the Golem, or see a Frankenstein movie?   Never hear the line “the monster lives”?    Now here we are, stuck with a real-life monster movie.   Simultaneously sickened and fascinated, terrified and thrilled, we watch it with horror — and a sense of terrible awe.