Awe

This is a word that is, all to often, taken for granted. "Awe" is not only a near onomatopeia, describing the sound that a crowd breathes at the heart stopping bang of a firework, but it is a powerfully encompassing word. Most of us use "awesome" and "awful" on a daily basis, which are also wonderful words taken for granted. Its definition is (forgive me, but I don't have our class dictionary on me): "an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful." Its almost as if, when this word was created, someone decided that creating a word for the feeling would be impossible, so they took the sound of a brain slowing down in the face of something terrible....awesome....awful.