[a nasty name for a nasty thing]
gather ye 'round girls and boys,
the word for today is ginormous.
humorous way of saying something is large? hip portmanteau neologism? no.
ginormous is nothing short of a linguistc abomination. this much is clear. don't use it yourself, distance yourself from those who do. shun your friends and disown your family members if you hear them use it. why?, by now you must be asking, perhaps in alarm or annoyance.
let us begin.
to start with, ginormous is entirely unnecessary - like tiny raincoats for birds, SUVs, tacking "at" to the end of inquiries beginning in "where", and riddling the bodies of catatonic, elderly plague patients with thirty thousand rounds from a fully-automatic firearm. there's simply no need. our rich and wonderful language already has an abundance, indeed a vast vocabulary of words that fully and delightfully convey the same meaning: why not simply huge? giant, perhaps. humongous. immense. gargantuan. colossal! there's a reason the largest known cephalopod on earth is the colossal squid and not the "ginormous squid." need something with a little more impact? how about mastadonic, behemothic, elephantine, monolithic, cyclopean, leviathan, prodigious, or (tied for my favorite) pantagruelian and brobdingnagian? we have words for these things. there are yet more. we haven't even started on adverbs.
but more importantly, let us examine for a moment the pronounciation of this detestable word.
[dʒaɪˈnɔɹməs]
phonetic assimilation between the first two syllables leaves us with an initial phoneme sounding something like "jine." primarly stress falls on it.
[dʒaɪn]
here the real problem begins. there is only one word that i am aware of in english that contains this phoneme: vagina.
[vədʒaɪnə]
like ginormous primary stress falls on the "jine." but that's just the root. from here we get to vaginant, vaginal, vaginate, vaginismus, vaginitis, vaginula, invaginate, vaginoplasty, and the horrifyingvaginectomy. the problem of course is not with vagina the word or the thing itself. it's a perhaps slightly awkward and unfortunate word for a thing deserving much better, but it's certainly on the better end of a historically long list. the problem is rather that of phonesthesia, that is, the association of semantic meaning on a particular phoneme. take, for example, the "sw" in swipe, sway, swell, swagger, swerve, swill, and swoosh, among others. it can't be defined exactly, but it does seem to have some sort of curvy-motion association. "jine" has the same effect. two hours after writing it, i've found that one "ragnar" on urban dictionary even considers it a slang term in itself (apparently the spelling "gine" is more popular. i had no idea). vaginas are great, but it's really unpleasant to hear a word, think vagina, and know it means huge.
gigantic vagina.
and lastly, at the height of my righteous prescriptivism, it just sounds idiotic. consider the following:
random bookstore customer a: fuck, dude, i ate the most ginormous burrito earlier. i mean, 'chipotle?' what is that shit even about??
random bookstore customer b: oh, i know! it's, like, way too much food.
as you can see, it isn't good. minimal intelligence. poor lifestyle choices. meaningless conversation with so-called friend whose doesn't care anyway.
so there you have it.
ginormous: just don't do it.
[here's to the new chandelier.]
the word for today is ginormous.
humorous way of saying something is large? hip portmanteau neologism? no.
ginormous is nothing short of a linguistc abomination. this much is clear. don't use it yourself, distance yourself from those who do. shun your friends and disown your family members if you hear them use it. why?, by now you must be asking, perhaps in alarm or annoyance.
let us begin.
to start with, ginormous is entirely unnecessary - like tiny raincoats for birds, SUVs, tacking "at" to the end of inquiries beginning in "where", and riddling the bodies of catatonic, elderly plague patients with thirty thousand rounds from a fully-automatic firearm. there's simply no need. our rich and wonderful language already has an abundance, indeed a vast vocabulary of words that fully and delightfully convey the same meaning: why not simply huge? giant, perhaps. humongous. immense. gargantuan. colossal! there's a reason the largest known cephalopod on earth is the colossal squid and not the "ginormous squid." need something with a little more impact? how about mastadonic, behemothic, elephantine, monolithic, cyclopean, leviathan, prodigious, or (tied for my favorite) pantagruelian and brobdingnagian? we have words for these things. there are yet more. we haven't even started on adverbs.
but more importantly, let us examine for a moment the pronounciation of this detestable word.
[dʒaɪˈnɔɹməs]
phonetic assimilation between the first two syllables leaves us with an initial phoneme sounding something like "jine." primarly stress falls on it.
[dʒaɪn]
here the real problem begins. there is only one word that i am aware of in english that contains this phoneme: vagina.
[vədʒaɪnə]
like ginormous primary stress falls on the "jine." but that's just the root. from here we get to vaginant, vaginal, vaginate, vaginismus, vaginitis, vaginula, invaginate, vaginoplasty, and the horrifyingvaginectomy. the problem of course is not with vagina the word or the thing itself. it's a perhaps slightly awkward and unfortunate word for a thing deserving much better, but it's certainly on the better end of a historically long list. the problem is rather that of phonesthesia, that is, the association of semantic meaning on a particular phoneme. take, for example, the "sw" in swipe, sway, swell, swagger, swerve, swill, and swoosh, among others. it can't be defined exactly, but it does seem to have some sort of curvy-motion association. "jine" has the same effect. two hours after writing it, i've found that one "ragnar" on urban dictionary even considers it a slang term in itself (apparently the spelling "gine" is more popular. i had no idea). vaginas are great, but it's really unpleasant to hear a word, think vagina, and know it means huge.
gigantic vagina.
and lastly, at the height of my righteous prescriptivism, it just sounds idiotic. consider the following:
random bookstore customer a: fuck, dude, i ate the most ginormous burrito earlier. i mean, 'chipotle?' what is that shit even about??
random bookstore customer b: oh, i know! it's, like, way too much food.
as you can see, it isn't good. minimal intelligence. poor lifestyle choices. meaningless conversation with so-called friend whose doesn't care anyway.
so there you have it.
ginormous: just don't do it.
[here's to the new chandelier.]