The use of the word massive has finally reached the point where I have to bitch about it.

This is to all you journalists.  Especially those in the automotive world where your job seems to require knowledge of at least 10,000 forms of hyperbole before getting a foot in the door.  To many of you, massive is just another word for “really a super whole bunch”.

Mass is a fundamental concept in physics.  In the most basic sense, mass is a quantity of matter.  The Washington Monument, a peanut M&M, and the air in my car tires (which I should go check) all have mass.  Therefore, the term massive should be applied to things that can be broken, squished, dropped, eaten, thrown, and so on.

Energy is another basic principle in our physical world.  One way to define it is “a state of being”.  Energy is not matter, so it doesn’t have mass.  Although it can be related to mass (think Albert Einstein and the mass-energy equivalence formula E = mc²), it is a very different concept.

So that brings me to my rant.  I was perusing a magazine article about a new hybrid car when I read this darling little sentence.

This process drastically cuts down on production time as well as wasted material and the massive amount of energy that traditional carbon manufacturing requires.

It’s a clumsy collection of words, that’s for sure.  But the guy who wrote it was was probably on a deadline so we’ll let that assessment slide.  (Let’s hope the editor was slammed with work, too.)

But our dear reporter tossed the final straw into this camel’s basket, and I’m not having it.  “Massive amount of energy” is an outrageous phrase.   I don’t care if you got a D in high school physics, you boob.  You can’t have “massive energy”.  You can have super whole bunches of it but not massive amounts.

Furthermore, massive already implies quantity, so it is redundant to add the word amount. 

So stop it.  Stop putting that word on your hot dog along with amazing, awesome, mind-blowing, incredible, and massive amounts of horseradish.