How an awesomesauce new suffix came to be

This etymology is seriously nerdsauce

Awesomesauce
(Image credit: (iStock))

In the beginning (as far back as the '80s), there was weak sauce. Laid back California dudes and college jocks alike wielded it in judgment of the uninspiring. Weak sauce at first hovered between noun phrase and adjective. It could literally refer to a type of sauce (that was lacking in flavor or alcoholic content), but as a whole it meant "lame." Eventually it became a single concept (reflected in the spellings weaksauce or weak-sauce) and an unambiguous adjective — you could say things like "that is so weaksauce" rather than "that is such weak sauce."

What then, was the opposite of weaksauce? Cool, rad, and awesome did the trick for a while, but in the early 2000s, analogy kicked in to produce awesomesauce. Awesomesauce not only had the casual, slangy vibe of weaksauce, it had a melodious sound profile. There was the similarity of the "awe" and "sauce" vowels, the repeated s-sounds.

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Arika Okrent

Arika Okrent is editor-at-large at TheWeek.com and a frequent contributor to Mental Floss. She is the author of In the Land of Invented Languages, a history of the attempt to build a better language. She holds a doctorate in linguistics and a first-level certification in Klingon. Follow her on Twitter.