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Unread May 14th, 2011, 05:38 am
susan53 susan53 is offline
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Default Re: Leaning Tower of Pisa

It's fine. Here are some other examples I've found of "huge" referring people/parts of the body etc :

1. oh, he's HUGE! He's only about five foot !
2. ....if you went up to ten stone you'd look HUGE
3. He was a HUGE young man of twenty-four, clothed in muscle
4. the world of my childhood, the towering HUGEness of my mother and father and my grown-up brother,
5. Ryan hefted his bulk up and supported it on one elbow. He rubbed his eyes sleepily with one huge paw.
6. a patient walked in with a HUGE swollen nose.

There's a difference between a tall person and a huge person. Tall just refers to height - a person may be tall and thin, like for instance a lot of basketball players. But huge suggests not necessarily height but rather (or possibly as well as) bulk - because of muscle, fat, general bone structure, inflammation, retention of liquid etc. It describes a body (or body part) which is unusually developed. For instance, a woman might describe herself as huge during the last month of pregnancy, or if you sprain your ankle and it swells up you might describe it as huge. The answers above can all be explained by this (though note that in 1 huge is used ironically - you get the idea of a small, weedy person- and 4 describes a child's perception - his family appear huge to him because he himself is so small).

This is also why I suggested "tall" for the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It's certainly a tall building, but not unusually so, and not particularly broad either. Here's a description of a "huge building" :

The Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center is the fourth largest building in the world by volume. The interior volume of the building is so large it can create its own weather including reports of “rain clouds forming below the ceiling on very humid days.”


Now that's a huge building...
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