find it hard to think of a word as unmoored from its root as “awesome”. It comes from the early Middle English age, meaning dread, or terror, but these fail to capture awe’s particular blend of fear, reverence and submission. It is often found in religious contexts (Milton wrote of “aw” in Paradise Regained), but crops up in politics too (Hobbes viewed awe as a valuable tool for an all-powerful state or Leviathan). Since the time of those writers there have been ongoing attempts to claim the
