Apolitical analyst recently referred to what he predicted would be “the enormity of the Republican victory this coming fall.” Based on that phrasing alone, you’d hardly know what the writer thought: Would a landslide be an outrage, or maybe an excellent thing?

The noun enormity, dating in English from the late 1400s, originally denoted either (1) deviation from sound morality; or (2) a crime, offense, or monstrous transgression. Etymologically, it was anything “outside the norm” of rectitude. In short, the noun has traditionally borne little relation to the sibling adjective enormous.

Only in the 1790s did enormity sporadically come to have anything to do with size. The Oxford English Dictionary has long labeled the idea of magnitude, vastness, or hugeness an obsolete sense, adding, in the current online edition: “Recent examples might perhaps be found, but the use is now regarded as incorrect.” Not so long ago, another language commentator said that using enormity for size alone is “ordinarily classed as illiteracy” (Bernice Randall, Webster’s New World Guide to Current American Usage [1988]). “Illiteracy”? Does that surprise you?

Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, writers on usage promoted the idea that enormity should denote monstrous wickedness, while enormousness should denote great size. But the noun enormousness has never been popular. People consider it clumsy. But why? Like enormity, it’s four syllables. The answer lies in its double sibilance and its four additional letters: Both make the word seem unwieldy.

Meanwhile, enormity has been shifting in sense. Consider this statistic: In 1850, the phrase enormity of the crime was 57 times as common in print as enormity of the task. But by 2019, enormity of the task had become three times as common as the phrase enormity of the crime. That’s a linguistic sea change.

Speakers of English don’t generally do well with having two cognate words bearing widely divergent meanings. Imagine if stylists urged people to make immensity mean one thing and immenseness quite another. The language has enough anomalies as it is.

We have just a few sets of cognate noun–adjective pairs like enormity/enormous, with radically divergent meanings. Words in this category don’t simply fall under the rubric of linguistic “differentiation,” by which related terms in the same part of speech take on nuances of meaning (think of luxuriant vs. luxurious, or observance vs. observation). Instead, the estranged-sibling category typically involves a corresponding noun–adjective pair that, despite their etymological relationship, have gone separate semantic ways. Their predominant meanings are thought of as dissimilar:

Atrocity (a horrific crime) vs. atrocious (really bad, esp. as a matter of taste), as in “an atrocious pun.”

Awe (a feeling of great respect) vs. awful (very bad or unpleasant), as in “an awful taste.”

Fantasy (an imaginary idea or belief) vs. fantastic (extremely good), as in “a fantastic round of golf.” (Fantastical, on the other hand, answers to fantasy.)

Notoriety (usually fame for whatever reason) vs. notorious (disreputable), as in “a notorious cheater.”

Phlegm (mucus, catarrh) vs. phlegmatic ([of a person] slow-moving, stolid, not excitable), as in “a phlegmatic temperament.”

Terror (extreme fear) vs. terrific (very good), as in “a terrific deal.”

Some pairs that might seem to fit the category don’t quite qualify. Noise (loud sound) and noisome (extremely unpleasant, as with a smell) came into English as distinct words with separate meanings. Only folk etymology — a popular but mistaken sense of word origins — has made them seem closely related. River (a natural inland waterway) and rival (a competitor [originally someone living on the opposite bank of a stream]) are etymologically related, but the pair is noun–noun — and there are many more instances of this kind of divergence. The essence of the estranged-sibling category is that a noun and its corresponding adjective, in modern usage, have little semantic overlap.

Among the pairs mentioned above, the only one that continually causes problems is enormity/enormous. The two words seem to want to end their estrangement. Many if not most English speakers are reluctant to use enormousness in all references to mere size. Increasingly, people want enormity in this non-wicked sense. Traditionalists bristle; they want the estrangement to continue. Everybody else wants the old feuding to stop. In the meantime, enormity occupies a kind of linguistic limbo because some perceive it as irretrievably derogatory.

For words in this kind of limbo — words that have undergone marked change in meaning and therefore are subject to dispute between traditionalists and everybody else — I invented the label “skunked terms.” Language aficionados often avoid them altogether to avoid the risk of distracting people: If you use them in the new way, you’ll bother traditionalists; if you use them in the traditional way, you might perplex many others. Among the words in this category, by their traditional definitions, are effete (worn out, exhausted), fulsome (offensive, sickening), hopefully (in a hopeful manner), intrigue (to plot underhandedly), and transpire (to become known, come to light). As the old senses fade into oblivion, and the odor wears off, the new uses become more acceptable.

Will enormity lose its sense of wickedness? It already has, to a great degree. In a general meeting, the managing partner of a law firm recently referred to the “enormity of the firm,” without a twitch or a twitter in the audience.

So back to the projected “enormity of the Republican victory this coming fall.” Was the pundit a highly literate speaker lamenting what he saw as a retrograde future, or a more ordinary speaker gushing about possible improvements in policy? I’m not telling. But you do know that political predictions are a dicey business with enormous room for error.