The word "colossus" is a correct and usable word in written English.
It is used to describe an object or person of enormous size or power. For example, "The skyscraper was a colossus of modern architecture, standing hundreds of feet above the city."
But times changed and the sandstone colossus was abandoned in the 1970s.
On Tuesday Lord Ashdown, the Lib Dems' former leader and 2015 campaign chief, released a joke press release describing Shapps as "quite simply a colossus", while footnoting that it had been "edited by Contribsx".
He is the undisputed colossus of corporate India.
IMAGINE you are the research director of a high-tech colossus, given the task of transforming your company by devising some game-changing new products.
The taciturn Texan, known as "Big Ed", seems to want to repeat his success by rehabilitating another fallen colossus of American industry.
Some of the great success stories of recent years have come from out-of-the-way places: who would have thought that Brazil would produce one of the world's most successful aircraft-makers (Embraer) or that New Zealand would give birth to a colossus of underwear (Icebreaker)?
The American search-and-advertising colossus may even be the single biggest private-sector influence on Africa.
Like the deep-sea dragon fish with its dislocatable jaw, the cocky Italian telecoms firm has bared its teeth at a colossus seven times its size.
ThyssenKrupp, a German steel colossus, launched an ambitious project in 2006 to make steel slabs in Brazil and process them in America.
Take architecture, of all things: Swiss Re's London office, known to locals as the Gherkin is just across the road from Lloyd's of London's inside-out colossus, still an eye-catcher 20 years after it went up.
The emergence of the corporate colossus, followed inexorably by its demonisation, is a familiar pattern in American business history.In this section Filling out the form Slight problem Mac attack What bottle On the edge Agree to differ An underworld classic Not horrid enough Inky devils ReprintsThe modern phenomenon of fast food originated in California just before the second world war.
