enormity
So far as I can piece together from the OED, the story is this:
1. Initially, "enormous" and "enormity" both had strongly negative connotations. (They have roughly corresponding etymologies, though "enormous" comes directly from Latin and "enormity" comes via French.)
2. Over time, they came to be associated with very big things; this happened somewhat earlier for "enormous" than "enormity".
3. Something happened around 1850 to make the OED decide that any use of "enormity" to mean "bigness" after that time was a usage error. By 1890, there's a citation of it as a usage error from a dictionary, so the idea that "enormity" can only mean "heinousness" was well-entrenched by then.
My question: does anyone know what that something was? Was there an organic decline in the use of "enormity" to mean "bigness", or did someone (who?) just decide to make a shibboleth out of it, and it propagated?
On some level I have trouble believing in the descriptive version of what's happening here (people just stopped using "enormity" to mean "bigness"), because even 150 years later people are still complaining about it, whereas nobody ever complains about people using the Austen definition of "sensitivity".
1. Initially, "enormous" and "enormity" both had strongly negative connotations. (They have roughly corresponding etymologies, though "enormous" comes directly from Latin and "enormity" comes via French.)
2. Over time, they came to be associated with very big things; this happened somewhat earlier for "enormous" than "enormity".
3. Something happened around 1850 to make the OED decide that any use of "enormity" to mean "bigness" after that time was a usage error. By 1890, there's a citation of it as a usage error from a dictionary, so the idea that "enormity" can only mean "heinousness" was well-entrenched by then.
My question: does anyone know what that something was? Was there an organic decline in the use of "enormity" to mean "bigness", or did someone (who?) just decide to make a shibboleth out of it, and it propagated?
On some level I have trouble believing in the descriptive version of what's happening here (people just stopped using "enormity" to mean "bigness"), because even 150 years later people are still complaining about it, whereas nobody ever complains about people using the Austen definition of "sensitivity".