It's just linguistic inflation. We've got a lot of it going on. Awesome no longer involves much awe, Epic events do not require the composition of multi-hour bardic narratives, and Wars are administrative proceedings against social phenomena the government has decided are bad, as opposed to trying to keep another country from stealing hunks of real estate by blowing pieces off of every available able-bodied male. As the actual amount of drama in average human lives decreases, we make things sound more exciting than they are so that the stuff that is going on seems important.