I am reading Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves and in it she discusses some things that bother language sticklers. She writes, “…and we got very worked up after 9/11 not because of Osama bin-Laden but because people on the radio kept saying ‘enormity’ when they meant ‘magnitude’, and we hate that.”
It seems to me that enormity is a proper word to use in regard to the 9/11 attacks. Bryan Garner’s Modern American Usage says that enormity means outrageousness, ghastliness, hideousness and that it is used to mean monstrous wickedness. This seems to make enormity an apt word to use in regard to the 9/11 attacks. Am I missing something? Does it mean something else in British usage (Truss is British)?
In either proposed sense, I’d say “enormity” works for the 9/11 attacks. They were large in scale, and certainly most people would feel negatively about them.
I’ve read Truss’s book, and as a British person I can’t see what she was complaining about.
Many people think “enormity” means “enormous.” I.E. “The USSR’s sheer enormity allowed it to…”
It’s wrong, in fact my dictionary + online sources don’t even give it as an archaic definition and only a hanful even acknowledge it as a possible usage (though most/all like American Heritage list it as a “usage problem”).
Enormity officialy means “outrageous or heinous on a grand scale.” As a half-comic article I once read said “War crimes are enormities. Extra-big bouncy castles are not.”
However, the definition may not be exactly what she’s getting at. If you say “the enormity of the situation was epic in scope.” (as I’ve heard it used on the radio) It’s relatively redundant and would DEFINATELY be better replaced with magnitude.
I think Lynne Truss happened to choose a bad example there, as the attacks could be said to be very big in scope AND quite outrageously bad.
(Eek, it feel sort of unholy, somehow, to find myself saying something negative about Lynne Truss)
The use of enormity instead of enormousness is one that gets the language purists riled up in both the UK and the US.
Theodore Bernstein, in The Careful Writer (1965):
Don’t worry about it. That battle was lost decades ago. You see enormity used everywhere and enormousness has become almost a forgotten word.
Lynne Truss is a self-educated pedant with little knowledge of language history. She also knows next to nothing at all about American usage. Her book is fun and a good guide for the average non-writer, but you can’t take it seriously as a book on language. It’s like reading Heloise for the history of female suffrage and womens’ rights.
And yet, I personally would avoid the word “enormity” unless I’m talking about something really awful, because I know it’s going to jar the nerves of readers who’ve seen it in its old context.
To paraphrase what the dictionary says about some other lost causes, it’s often used that way, but to do likewise is to risk being considered wrong by some readers. (Then again, some writers seem to want that.)
I wouldn’t use “enormousness,” either, because it just sounds silly to me. “Magnitude” seems adequate.
BTW: I don’t recall what Truss said exactly. It didn’t strike me. Perhaps I took it that she meant the “misuse” started turning up more often after people heard the word being used correctly in the 9/11 context. I don’t think I have that book anymore (it was sacrificed to lebensraum).
This is completely incorrect on almost every particular.
Enormity has been used to mean “enormousness” for more than two centuries. The first relevant citation given in the Oxford English Dictionary, under “excess in magnitude, hugeness, vastness”, comes from 1792. This meaning is corroborated by both Merriam-Webster and the American Heritage Dictionary. If your dictionary does not have this definition, then your dictionary sucks. Further, this is not a problem of it being “an archaic usage” - the sense of “hugeness” is a newer definition of the word, not an older definition. Speakers logically extrapolated from the adjective enormous which had previously undergone a similar change in meaning.
And though the American Heritage has the definition noted as a “Usage Problem”, that doesn’t mean anything beyond the fact that some people complain about it. Yes, some pedants consider this extension in meaning unfortunate, but our language is what it is, regardless of what people would like it to be.
Even more bizarre is your assertion that words have “official” meanings. I don’t want to speak for esoteric areas such as government or the law, but words as they’re commonly spoken and written don’t “officially” mean a damn thing. They’re spoken and then they’re understood, or they’re spoken and then they’re not understood. Generally we prefer the former to the latter, and maybe there was once a problem with enormity, but if people are still confused after two hundred years, then that’s their problem. The word goes merrily forth entirely unconcerned.
The language is what people say, and what people say changes constantly. I don’t hold it against writers who want to adhere to the older senses of the word in order to avoid jarring readers, but it’s still incredibly silly for pedants to become outraged about changes in the system when in fact the system quite literally never stops changing.
The best way to cope with language isn’t daily rituals of scorn and derision. When dealing with a system that doesn’t sit still, it’s far better to develop an aesthetic founded on the beauty of evolution.
Hmmmm. The Cambridge dictionary includes two definitions for the word, one simply being large or important. However, the Telegraph and Guardian style guides both specifically disapprove of this. There’s simply no consensus, even within British usage.
Well, if an entire community of writers regularly wrote that way without normally finding such usages jarring, then, yes, those would become correct spelling conventions for that community. And why not? Different communities do have different spelling conventions, and spelling conventions change over time (in many cases, drastically so).
That having been said, let’s also note that spoken language is by far primary to written language, in a certain sense, and in spoken language, there generally is no significantly raisable issue of misguided confusion of “effect” and “affect”, as they truly are homophonous (at least, in every existing accent of English I’m aware of). So, in that context, it may not be the best example for you to use.
Not in mine. There may only be small differences in the sounds of the initial vowel, but I’m pretty sure that in many British accents (and perhaps beyond) they are certainly not homophones. Of course, the pronunciation of either word in itself may vary for a single speaker, depending on context or even at random. I know that latter is the case when I say ‘either’!
Oh, wow, checking the OED pronunciation guide, it appears you are correct regarding British speakers (of course); an embarrassing oversight, and I am duly chagrined. I should not have made such a bold assertion without actually doing the basic research first. Well, strike that part of my post (except, of course, with respect to those accents for which it remains accurate…).
Returning to Two and a Half’s concerns regarding “correct” usage:
Maybe we should ask what it is that the concept of “correct” usage is meant to capture, and what the merit of adhering to “correct” usage in this sense is? Scientific theories are correct when they accurately describe the operation of the world, for example. It’s easy to understand what “correct” means there, and why one would prefer correct theories to incorrect theories, in this sense. But that doesn’t seem to be the kind of correctness you are talking about here with language usage. Similarly, actions can be judged correct or incorrect on moral grounds, but, again, I doubt you feel there is a moral dimension to usage questions. So then, what is going on here?
Well, it seems that “correct” usage for you means “adhering to the prescriptive standards you can read in books and such by self-appointed language guardians”. Apart from the difficulties in extracting a very sharp coherent notion of correctness out of this (since, after all, the pedants contradict each other with great frequency on an overwhelming variety of issues), there is still the question of “Well, what is preferable about adhering to such a ‘standard’?”. It’s not actually an accurate description of how people speak or what people naturally find jarring; if it were, it wouldn’t need to be written down in books to remind people to consciously pay attention to it. And, thus, it doesn’t actually aid one’s communicative abilities to adhere to such externally imposed “rules”. So even if you wish to label those manners of usage “correct” and the actual descriptively accurate rules of how English speakers do in fact speak as often “incorrect” (though I wish you wouldn’t), what is the merit of concern with the former over what would seem, on the face of it, to be the considerably greater usefulness of study of the latter?
There is a big difference between how people speak and how they write. I do not really care how someone speaks. If ambiguity is created by what they say I can just ask what they mean. But in written language (and oratory) there is a need to clear and using words correctly helps the reader understand the message.
Take this example (stolen from Garner):
“Americans are well aware of the enormity of the long-term-care problem that is facing the country.”
What does this sentence mean? Does the writer mean that something sinister is at work or does she mean that a big problem looms? The writer probably means a big problem looms, but the ambiguity would be cleared up by proper word choice.
Only the most twisted logic could apply the pedants’ definition of wickedness to the long term care issue. That would be a greater solecism than using enormity to mean size.
And pulling single sentences out of context to parse their meaning has value only on English exams. In real life the context of the surrounding sentences normally clears up any possible questions. Has the writer been talking about long-term-care as a moral issue of horrors inflicted on the elderly? Then enormity may be the right word. If not, and it’s hard to imagine a standard journalist doing so, then the use of enormity to mean size is obvious.
Most examples of the curse of ambiguity are false dilemmas, concocted out of context. Ambiguity happens, but seldom because of the reasons that the pedants claim. Usually, if they claim a problem, it’s their problem: the problem being that they haven’t kept current with the English language.
The written language is dependent on certain artificial conventions. By this, I mean that the written language needs to be taught, whereas any healthy human will learn the spoken language of their region without fail. Our speech development is entirely instinctual and can in fact be considered one of the primary criteria for what actually makes us human beings.
So as far as spelling goes… it depends.
If you’re a student in one of my classes? Yes, it’s a mistake. And it’s the same with most every professionally edited publication. But that mistake is entirely dependent on context. The New Yorker prescribes the use of a dieresis with words such as “coöperate”. Not to insert those rock dots is a mistake, but only when you’re writing for the New Yorker. If your boss is editor of the local town paper, you might get smacked with a roll of newsprint and called a smarmy git for doing something like that.
But if you’re text-messaging your BFF? No, it wouldn’t be. How could effect/affect possibly be a mistake in that context unless you were personally unsatisfied with what you had written?
The ambiguity would be cleared up only if both the writer and reader use the same definition. Reserving enormity for bad things is just as confusing for people who think of “hugeness” when they see enormity. Look up Garner’s entry on Skunked Terms for an idea about how this works.
This is, incidentally, why I have a problem with Garner. If he followed his own principles, he wouldn’t recommend choices that are potentially ambiguous in this way. His mini-essays are alone worth the price of the book, but his individual word entries aren’t nearly so good.
ETA: I was giving you the benefit of the example, but I do agree with Exapno Mapcase about the lack of ambiguity in your particular choice, and also about the importance of context.
