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| The present tense of brobdinagian...and the future |
The title word grabbed you didn’t it? I’ll be
honest. It got me too.
I pride myself with having a pretty sizeable
vocabulary. In fact when my
daughter was little she didn’t go to Merriam Webster for her definitions, she
just asked mom. And now that she is grown, it is not unusual to receive a phone
call from her asking me to define a word.
That’s me, good old mom the walking dictionary.
Being the conceited wordsmith I imagine myself to
be, it took me aback when watching one of my favorite TV shows, “The big bang
theory," one of the characters tossed out the word... “Brobdingnagian.”
I thought, hmmmm this is a TV show, and it can’t
be a real word, so I looked it up and sure as shooting Mr. Webster
disagreed. It is a word and it
means marked by tremendous size.
The origins are appropriately related to "Brobdingnag" the imaginary land of
giants in Gulliver’s Travels.
I guess you really can learn something new from
television, even if it isn’t on the discovery channel. Excepting reality TV shows, the descriptive phrase "Boob tube" is steadily becoming a brobdingnagian fallacy.
When my daughter and I play Words with friends
(which we do all the time since I am such a nerd at heart) and she uses
one of her off the wall words that no one has ever heard of, I will simply pull
out brobdinagian and walk away with the win.
