It was while working on this column that a small tweetstorm developed around the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Tyson tweeted that "awesome" was being used to amplify the banal:
This brought upon him more than a bit of flak which was perhaps at least partially well deserved. It also wasn't the first time that Tyson had lodged this complaint. He'd done so both three and six years earlier. But deserved or not, it's hard not to concur that Instagram accounts have a tendency to exaggerate the ordinary.