awesome sauce!

[Ben Zimmer]

The intensive suffix "-sauce" as in "awesome-sauce" and "lame-sauce"
was in the running in the Most Creative category in the 2010 Word of
the Year proceedings. You can see examples of "awesome-sauce" going
back to 2001 in the Summer 2011 installment of "Among the New Words"
(AmSp 86.2, p. 208): http://bit.ly/ATNW86-2

--bgz

On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 8:32 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
> OK, there's like this girl on TV? And she's advertising the same bank that
> offers either frog protection or fraud protection depending on which guy
> you believe? So she's so happy with the promised service that she shouts,
> "Awesome sauce!" and the girl on the other end of the phone says there's
> only one other person on the planet who uses that expression!  So they
> recognize each other.
>
> This ad has been running for months, exposing millions to the inanity that
> is "awesome sauce!"
>
> UrbanDictionary gives two examples (2005, 2006) and a couple of odd clones
> like "awesome sauce banana peel!"
>
> You can buy T-shirts too.
>
> Antonyms include "weak sauce"  and "lame sauce," acc. to Online Slang
> Dictionary.
>
> The incredibly large-scale map provided by OSD (not OED) shows,
> astonishingly, that "awesome sauce!" is used in only one place on earth,
> near the town of Castlegar, British Columbia, which is north of Trail.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org