ENORMITY
I nearly choked on my cornflakes. Peter Mandelson, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, used this word while being interviewed on breakfast-time radio about Northern Ireland. I’d come in part-way through, so I cringed at the thought of what awful happening had just transpired in that troubled province. But he was actually talking about the new Northern Ireland Assembly.
Mr Mandelson is apparently highly regarded by all sides in Northern Ireland, but not — it seems — for the precision of his vocabulary. He shares a misapprehension about the meaning of enormity with many other people, especially those reporting for the media.
Enormity has for generations had a special meaning that is quite distinct from enormousness, the word that those who misuse enormity are presumably groping for. “Extreme or monstrous wickedness”, the Oxford English Dictionary says, or “a gross and monstrous offence”. Both of those would fit many events in Northern Ireland in the past twenty years, but not the creation of the Assembly.
Both enormousness and enormity come from the same Latin root enormis, which is a compound of e, out, plus norma, which was the word for a carpenter’s set square or pattern (it’s also the origin of our normal). So something described as enormis was literally misshapen or out of true, though its usual sense in Latin was a transgression or some deviation from legal or moral rectitude.
The word came over into English via French first as enorm and only later split into the two adjectives we now have. Both enormity and enormousness began life with much the meaning of enorm, and for a while both were used in the same sense, for something that was unusual or strikingly irregular. As late as 1774 Thomas Warton could write in his History of English Poetry that people “entered the choir in ... enormous disguises”, and didn’t mean they were big. But by his time both words usually meant something so out of the ordinary that it was monstrous or outrageous. Gradually they split meanings, with enormity taking on the whole of the condemnatory sense, while enormousness settled for mere size.
It would be good to keep them apart, but enormity is almost certainly condemned to an unpropitious future as a grander (and pithier) version of enormousness. Between 5 and 10 percent of its appearances in the British National Corpus already use it this way. Language evolves, and we mustn’t emulate King Canute, but to lose precision in this way is like watching the waves erode the beach.
