Ginormous
I just love words and language. Mostly etymologies, slang, and idioms. How great is "snug as a bug in a rug"?
Anyway, my new favorite word is ginormous. At first I thought it was a recent word, but if you Google it you find that it has been around since mid-century, and is even in the OED. They record the first use as in 1948.
It is interesting how new words are made. Who would have thought that gigantic and enormous (not to mention huge, colossal, humongous, immense, massive, jumbo, and mammoth) were not enough to describe all the variations of super large, and that we needed ginormous to fill a gap in the language.
I think ginormous has the implication of humorously large, while enormous means out of the ordinary large, and gigantic means giant like. so, there are nuances in the meanings.
I did once see the word written as gynormous. I think it was just a misspelling, but it is fun to think of what gynormous could mean...... a very large woman, or something bursting with womanlyness, like a Georgia O'Keefe painting. Or even a womanly norm, as in gyn-normous.
Anyway, my new favorite word is ginormous. At first I thought it was a recent word, but if you Google it you find that it has been around since mid-century, and is even in the OED. They record the first use as in 1948.
It is interesting how new words are made. Who would have thought that gigantic and enormous (not to mention huge, colossal, humongous, immense, massive, jumbo, and mammoth) were not enough to describe all the variations of super large, and that we needed ginormous to fill a gap in the language.
I think ginormous has the implication of humorously large, while enormous means out of the ordinary large, and gigantic means giant like. so, there are nuances in the meanings.
I did once see the word written as gynormous. I think it was just a misspelling, but it is fun to think of what gynormous could mean...... a very large woman, or something bursting with womanlyness, like a Georgia O'Keefe painting. Or even a womanly norm, as in gyn-normous.
Labels: language
posted by Shelly at 6:15 AM
5 Comments:
Well, knock me down and call me Clifton Fadiman!
D. Parker
Okay - this has nothing to do with your post, but today I am so bored that I looked at all your links again. I must say, unfortunately, I don't get "Television without pity." Maybe because I just skimmed it and saw immediately that I don't watch any of the featured shows? Should I investigate further? What am I missing?
Oh, wait! I meant H. L. Mencken.
yeah who is clifton fadiman?
twop is good if you watch shows and miss them and want a recap. otherwise not much use.
Clifton Fadiman may be considered the prime example of the "witty intellectual" type that was popular on television in the 1950s. John Charles Daly, Bennett Cerf, George S. Kaufman, Alexander King and a number of other television celebrities personified, along with Fadiman, the highly-educated, elegant, patrician raconteurs and pundits who were regarded by TV executives of that era as appealing to the upper-class owners of expensive early TV sets. A native of Brooklyn and a graduate of Columbia University, Fadiman worked for Simon & Schuster for ten years, ending as its chief editor. He spent another ten years (1933-1943) in charge of The New Yorker's book review section and in 1944 became a judge for the Book of the Month Club. His eminently quotable witticisms and sayings were frequently printed in newspapers and magazines. "When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before, you see more in you than there was before", was one of the better known.
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