tremendosity

From tremend(ous) +‎ -osity.

tremendosity (countable and uncountable, plural tremendosities)

1. (rare, uncountable) The state or condition of being tremendous.
   • 1837 March 18, “Theatricals”, in Figaro in London, volume VI, number 276, London: (or the Proprietor) by W. Strange, , page 44, column 1:

     He talks of enlarging the stage after Easter, probably to make room for Mrs. Honey’s foot, which is remarkable for its tremendosity.

   • 1848 August 5, Bell’s Life in Sydney and Sporting Reviewer, volume IV, number 158, Sydney, N.S.W., page , column 1:

     The lady librarian waxing wroth at our complimentary notice of her smithy, blew the bellows with such tremendosity, in the effervescence of her indignation, as to scatter over the neighbouring roofs, the 24 first pages of the ‘Mysteries of London,’ and Jack and the Bean-stalk.’

   • 1898 July 8, Hooami, “Notes in General”, in The Stanmore Observer, Affiliated with The Wealdstone, Harrow and Wembley Observer, number 169, page :

     We arrived punctually, and as we walked down the thoroughfare, so majestically lined with eating-houses, public-houses, and a boot shop, that leads to the sea front, I was amazed at the tremendosity (I can find no other word, it is of my own manufacture, and I dedicate it to the public for ever) of the crowds that turned out to welcome us.

   • 1903, James Henry, “The Idealists”, in The Mortarboard, he Junior Class of Barnard College, books II–III, pages 86–87:

     He looked at her for a moment. “You are prodigious,” he said, richly. “I see that you understand me,” and she paused for a moment of introspection. “It is what, in the long run, I feel to be my actuating ideal—I mean, of course, our sympathy.” The tremendosity of the implication, at all events, arrested his attention. “I,” her interlocutor was thoughtfully considering, “agree, and—there you are.” “It is what,” she paused for a moment, with a pleasant pointedness of manner, “after all, means most to me. He is of sympathy, a tremendosity, a richness, a vagueness, that quite satisfies me.”

   • 1903 January, William Dean Howells, “Mr. Henry James’s Later Work”, in George [Brinton McClellan] Harvey, editor, The North American Review, volume CLXXVI, number 1 / DLIV, New York, N.Y.: The North American Review Publishing Co., section III, pages 128–129:

     “But that is just what does not happen in the case of Mr. James’s people. They are merged in the background so that you never can get behind them, and fairly feel and see them all round. Europe doesn’t detach them; nothing does. ‘There they are,’ as he keeps making his people say in all his late books, when they are not calling one another dear lady, and dear man, and prodigious and magnificent, and of a vagueness or a richness, or a sympathy, or an opacity. No, he is of a tremendosity, but he worries me to death; he kills me; he really gives me a headache. He fascinates me, but I have no patience with him.”

   • 1908, Marcus Hitch, “Comments”, in Goethe’s Faust: A Fragment of Socialist Criticism, Chicago, Ill.: Charles H[ope] Kerr & Company, page 74:

     Because in the eye of a Property Society these are not human beings, but are merely pawns, like Gretchen, who exist only for the purpose of allowing a real human being like Faust to work out what is pompously called the tremendous “problems of life” that present themselves to the bourgeois mind. This overpowering sense of the “tremendosity” of human “problems” is one of the manifestations of that hypocrisy which has ever characterized the domineering class. These problems are nothing more nor less than how to keep down the subject class and make it believe itself incompetent to assume control and make itself happy. Overwhelmed by the “tremendosity” of this problem, the bourgeois mind seeks to solve it by formulas more difficult than the problem itself.

   • 1923 November 10, O[liver] W[endell] Holmes [Jr.], edited by Mark DeWolfe Howe, Holmes-Laski Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, 1916-1935, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, published 1953, page 561:

     Then the Greeks were nearer akin to rustic manners of the present day. There is no indirection in their speech — I don’t know Euripides more than very slightly. I think I notice the recurrence of favorite collocations and rhythms, but don’t challenge me — along with great magic power a suggestion of formula. All said there is a lot of tremendosity in it.

   • 1931, The Week-end Review, volume 4, page 576, column 1:

     They would have seen as he saw, the tremendosity, the marvel, the hugeness of the Big Bang, rolling and echoing through all England.

   • 1966 April 4, George Eyer, “How About That!”, in The Daily Oklahoman, volume 75, number 89, Oklahoma City, Okla.: Oklahoma Publishing Co., page 14, column 6:

     SOME mild grousing in the press about Britain’s Prince Philip complaining of American coffee doesn’t take into consideration the tremendosity of the problem of drinking a toast with a cup of coffee.

   • 1969, The New York Times Book Review, page 13:

     Yet it becomes increasingly hard to believe that Mr. Stokes has discovered any sentimental or slipshod or irrational tremendosity which warrants such squalidity of rhetoric—or such paucity of clear thinking.

   • 1996 February, “Good old ‘The Internet’, it’s certainly the best”, in Amiga Action, number 79, IDG Media, page 36:

     They say, ‘There’s nowt as queer as folk’. They say, ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’. And recently, the omnipresent and ever wise ‘they’ have also been saying that the Internet is the communication medium of the future; that it will revolutionise the way we think, act, and talk; that it will replace the television, washing machine, and electric potato peeler in our homes; that it is, in short, great. Or, if you will, tremendous. Now in the opinion of this humble organ (woohoo!), one of these statements isn’t true. A bird in the hand is indeed of particular value in comparison to double the amount of bush-dwelling flying vertebrates, and folk are most certainly unchallenged in their queerness. Which therefore leaves the matter of the Internet and its questionable tremendosity.

   • 1999 November 24, pjdiaz, “Sucesses and Failures in Cuban Music Ed”, in rec.music.afro-latin (Usenet):

     > As anyone in education would tell you: A 20% INCREASE IN LITERACY RATES IS / > TREMENDOUS!!! / Say... would "anyone in education" care to "tell" us which countries that have achieved this 20% increase in literacy rates in the past, say, 40 years? Just, you know, so one can assign some value to the "TREMENDOSITY" and, of course, take a gander at the different costs these countries have paid to achieve this.

   • 2001 August 26, Steve D. Perkins, “(ot) Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back”, in rec.sport.pro-wrestling (Usenet):

     Err, okay... the number of times someone says the word "fuck" is a criteria in how highly you rate a film? "Dude... brahs... the movie would have been pure suckage, total craptitude... but they dropped 5,000 F-bombs, so it totally reeked of splenditude and tremendosity!".

   • 2002 April 25, TAPKAE, “Ah, yes a red lion can!”, in alt.music.mike-keneally (Usenet):

     Ah, those were the days... June '98. Sunny as anything, Keneally at the Cat-a-moron (sic) on the 12th, and Ah yes a read lion can! And let's not forget the almighty even of the dawning of "Ed gives a hen hoot" (it has marked history forever, yep!) Its hard to convey the tremendosity of the feeling permeating those days. People now consider trommel parlors as the current defining standard by which I am judged.

2. (rare, countable) Someone or something that is tremendous.
   • 1909 October 16, “Pithy Pars”, in The Critic, volume V, number 220, page 3, column 1:

     The functions were chiefly remarkable, not for sport, but for diluted tea and cake and a tremendosity of luscious local girl.

   • 1924, “Knights of Columbus Initiate”, in The Notre Dame Scholastic, Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, page 390, column 2:

     The speaker of the evening was the Rev. John Cavanaugh, C. S. C., former president of the Unievrsity. He delivered a splendid address which was entitled “Tremendosities.”

   • 1925, Adrian Stokes, The Thread of Ariadne, E. P. Dutton & Company, page 4:

     All of you, in varying degrees, are being driven from pillar to post in this world of intertwining tremendosities. Little stands secure, except for the Exclusivists, i.e., for those who can choose through the harmony of their personalities pickings from the world according to their tastes.

   • 1970, Road & Track, volume 22, page 78:

     But the star of the weekend was OMS itself. Without going into its tremendosities, let’s just agree that it’s without doubt the world’s finest racing plant.

• tremendousness