"enormous" = "extremely significant"?

[Benjamin Barrett]

I read this as "a lot." Whether spoken in English or translated from Japanese, it looks like someone was not aware that "enormous" needs to be followed by something like "quantity" for non-count nouns. A likely Japanese candidate for the source is 巨大 (kyodai).

Benjamin Barrett
Formerly of Seattle, WA

Learn Ainu! https://sites.google.com/site/aynuitak1/videos

On Mar 15, 2014, at 12:57 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at ATT.NET> wrote:

> Ryoji Noyori, a Nobel laureate in chemistry and president of the
> Riken Center for Developmental Biology, where the
> currently-under-question research that reported a "simple acid bath"
> could turn body cells into stem cells was conducted, is quoted by the
> NYTimes as saying "An inexperienced researcher collected enormous
> data, and her handling of it was extremely careless."
>
> I don't know whether this is a translation from Japanese (the author
> of the NYT article  is Japanese) or Noyori spoke in English.  In
> either case --  Does "enormous data" mean "extremely
> significant"?  Or "an extremely large amount" of it?  (The latter
> would strike me as incorrect -- the experimental data collected
> surely was not on the scale of subatomic particle collisions.  And
> I'd expect the phrasing "enormous amount of data".)

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