Why this word is great
SUBLIMITY — [Noun] The quality of inspiring transcendent awe, typically through vastness, overwhelming power, or terrifying grandeur. From Middle English sublimite, from Middle French sublimité and Latin sublīmītās, from sublīmis ("uplifted, lofty, exalted"). Unlike "grandeur," which emphasizes impressive scale and splendor, or "beauty," which offers harmonic comfort, sublimity shatters the merely aesthetic to confront the observer with the overwhelming and the infinite. It is the silent, vertiginous drop of a mountain chasm that makes you clutch at solid rock; the furious, white-capped expanse of an ocean storm seen from a frail deck; the cold, indifferent glitter of a star-field that renders human history a brief footnote. In that union of beauty and terror, the self is both annihilated and, paradoxically, made acutely, poignantly alive.