Massive attack

Massive has a big presence in print media, too. Just last week, Apple placed a “massive” order for iPhone camera modules, there was a “massive” bomb blast in Afghanistan, someone launched a “massive cyber attack,” and “massive” crowds gathered to honor Michael Jackson, who according to some reports died of a “massive” heart attack.

Massive seems a reasonable enough adjective for a mass of camera modules or people. But just how far from its literal sense can “massive” legitimately drift? Walsh asks. Is it really OK to call things “massive” if - like malicious software or a fire or a heart attack - their mass is negligible or irrelevant?

The usage question is quite a recent one, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. The use of massive proliferated during World War II, with the widespread reports of massive bombings, massive assaults, and massive breakthroughs. That prompted a wave of objections, beginning in the 1960s, and as late as 1993, columnist James Kilpatrick asserted that a balloon could not be massive, “for massive bears a connotation of solidity.”

Certainly, it had that connotation at first. The noun mass originally meant “a dense aggregation,” according to the OED. (The word came into English from French, and it traces its ancestry to the Latin for “dough” and the Greek for “barley-cake.”) But massive had also been used in extended senses, and applied to immaterial things, since the 16th century. The OED’s earliest example dates to 1581: “Religious skill is far more massive.” It also quotes the Scottish philosopher (and English grammarian) Alexander Bain, in 1855, describing a “sensation of chillness” as “massive and powerful.”

That doesn’t mean massive is always the best synonym for huge, deadly, overwhelming, humongous, ubiquitous, and so on. Mass also means “the quantity of matter which a body contains,” and to anyone sensitive to that usage, whether a physicist or a science fiction fan, describing an empty space as “massive” will go over like a lead balloon.

But one person’s jarring image is another person’s innocuous cliché, and the usage police have never been able to draw the line between legal and illegal applications of massive. Criticism of the adjective mostly sidesteps the question of what massive should properly mean, and merely alleges that it’s “overused.”

If it is overused, that probably just means that we’ll get used to its weightless applications all the sooner. “Massive heart attack” seems to be here to stay, though it usually means nothing more specific than “sudden, serious cardiac event.” Some of us may hear a false note in “massive gap” or “massive crater,” but the American Heritage (like other dictionaries) notes that massive can mean “large or imposing, as in quantity, scope, degree, intensity, or scale,” or even “large in comparison with the usual amount: a massive dose.”

The New York Times stylebook, one of the last holdouts, instructs that massive is “best reserved for references to physical bulk. A building or a mountain may be massive, but use a fresher description for a budget or a fire.” I’d go along with that. But when a style “rule” has withered to “best reserved for,” it’s probably one edition away from peeve heaven.

TO HAVE OR TO HOLD: Not long ago, reader Kate Luxemburg heard herself answer a question with an old idiom: “No, I don’t hold any truck with that.” She Googled the phrase and found that it still has plenty of users, but she wonders what its origin is.

The truck part is easy enough. Truck is trade, commerce, barter; since the 17th century, it has also meant dealings of any kind, as in “Huckleberry Finn”: “It was just like I thought, He didn’t hold no truck with the likes of me.” Or in the New York Times, in 1936: “Metro will have no truck with Goldwyn.”

But this idiom is almost always phrased “have no truck,” not (despite Huck’s usage) “hold no truck.” I wonder whether, for some users, it blends into “hold with,” a separate expression that means “side with, approve of.” Eeyore uses it in “Winnie-the-Pooh”: “I don’t hold with all this washing {hellip} this modern Behind-the-ears nonsense.”

Of course, the senses overlap enough that “have no truck with” often works either way: If you have (or hold) no truck with violent movies, you probably mean that you don’t approve of them or watch them. But there is - or was, once upon a time - a difference.

E-mail Jan Freeman at mailtheword@gmail.com. For past columns, go to boston.com/ideas.