Backwards Metaphor

We had a riddle in sixth grade: How much dirt is in a hole two feet by three feet by four feet. (Well, none. A hole is empty.) I ran into someone using “massive” to refer to a hole. I’d say they have it backwards.

As you’ll see in this photo, there is a positively massive crater in the middle of the woods, and officials are operating on the principle that it was “dug by hand.”

Normally articles at Motherboard are pretty well written, but his guy was a little too informal for my taste. What’s wrong with “huge”? or “big enough to hide in”? even “curiously large”? Instead, the writer (and the editor allowed it) used a word that means “has lots of mass” to describe something empty. Here’s a picture of the hole:

Okay, the more actually massive something is, the larger it is likely to be, but this guy must not see holes very often.

Since I’m in a curmudgeonly mood, I’ll point out two more things he could improve:

1. “as you’ll see…” Avoid the future tense unless you have to use it. Should have written “as you can see…”
2. “there is…” Avoid using the false subject. You miss a chance to have some meaningful content when you use “there is.” How about something like “The woods near our house recently acquired a large hole…” or maybe, “An unexplained hole just appeared in our woods…”

Harrumpf.