The Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage - Noel's ESL ...

enormity or enormousness
tendency towards variation can be constrained in specialised contexts such as
communication for ships and aircraft, and perhaps within the fields of science
and technology. But as long as English responds to the infinitely variable needs
of everyday communication in innumerable geographical and social contexts, it
is bound to diversify. No single set of norms can be applied round the world,
to decide what is “correct” or what forms to use. The analogy of Latin—which
spread to all parts of the Roman empire and diversified into the various Romance
languages—may well hold for English in the third millennium.
English language databases Statements about language or anything else are
only as valid as the evidence that supports them. The evidence needs to be more
than impressionistic and anecdotal if we are to evaluate linguistic diversity and
change around us. To provide large bodies of evidence, a number of computerised
databases of English have been built since 1961. The pioneering work in this field
was done at Brown University, Rhode Island USA with the compilation of the
Brown corpus (database) of one million words of written American English, taken
in a number of clearly defined categories. Its British counterpart, the LOB corpus
(Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen), uses an equivalent range of samples, also from 1961. Since
then parallel corpora of American and British English from the 1990s, codenamed
Frown and flob, have been compiled at Freiburg University in Germany. Much
larger multimillion word corpora have also been compiled in both Britain and
the US, though they set less store by systematic sampling, and are not directly
comparable with others.
In Australia the ACE corpus (Australian Corpus of English) compiled at
Macquarie University is exactly like Brown and LOB, with samples from a
wide variety of local publications: newspapers, magazines, and books of fiction
and nonfiction. The samples are all from 1986. The Australian ICE corpus (=
International Corpus of English) also matches databases constructed in other parts
of the English-speaking world, and consists of one million words, but includes both
spoken and written data (50%/50%), sampled in the period 1991–4. Evidence from
ACE and ICE-AUS has been offered wherever possible in the entries of this book.
enormity or enormousness Is there any difference between these, apart
from their obvious difference in bulk? Both are used as abstract nouns for
enormous, to express the notion of hugeness, vastness or immensity. However
some people would reserve enormousness for that meaning, and insist that
enormity carries a sense of strong moral outrage, connoting the heinousness of a
deed or event. Compare:
The enormity of the crime made the people take the law into their own hands.
With the enormousness of the calculations, the computer crashed.
The distinction just illustrated is rather difficult to maintain, especially when
the adjective enormous can only mean “huge”. It once carried the additional
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