#116 - A Ginormous Problem

A Ginormous Problem

1/21/08 (#116)

Just as it is fascinating to live in a city on the cusp of exponential growth, the skyline growing more jagged by the week as each new junior-varsity skyscraper arises to hold another few hundred Portland couples and there .2 children, it is enjoyable to live in a language that perpetually expands and contracts with each passing fad. Sure, it's disconcerting to hear a fifty-something white man use the word "shiznit", but it's also disconcerting to see a fifty-something man in a bikini---and that's hardly the fault of the bikini. For the most part, I embrace such linguistic developments (even if don't adopt the new terminology into my daily vocabulary), but there is one word that I hear with growing regularity that causes me to lament that the English language has no bouncer at the door:

Ginormous.

This adjective is apparently a mash-up of gigantic and enormous, emerging to describe that specifically particular size that is slightly larger than gigantic but not quite enormous. Or perhaps enormous is the lesser adjective? Considering that they're nearly perfect synonyms, ranking them is like identifying the largest egg in a full carton of "large" eggs.

When I began contemplating the growing ubiquity of ginormous (both number of users and number of uses seem on the rise) I suspected the origin lay in each generation's desire to create a language of their own: The flappers of a century ago spawned an amazingly creative argot full of reinventions (Fire Extinguisher: The chaperone on a date; Smudger: A person who likes to dance closely) and creations (23 skidoo: To ask/order someone to leave), a manner of speech that surely sounded like a foreign language to the generation that preceded them. (Peruse the "Flapper" section of any slang dictionary and you'll see how extensive their reinventions were, and how influential their vernacular was to our modern English.) After that, the Beboppers arrived with another personalization of the available language, and the soldiers of World War II generated new phrases of their own. Then came Bobby Sockers, hippies, hip-hoppers, gen-Xers, skateboarders, ad infinitum---each generation modifying the language to suit its new tastes. Just as General Motors urged young drivers that "this is not your father's Oldsmobile", the latest generation doesn't want to be saddled with having to use their parent's vocabulary; just as Kerouac doesn't mirror the syntax of Shakespeare, modern generations want to redecorate the sentence to reflect their new personality.

While I thoroughly support the mashing of two unrelated words to create a new adjective (I've created many of my own, collected in my Ridictionary), the vocabulary mash-up requires the application of creative sensibilities: The new word should shine in a way that the old words no longer did. For instance, I coined the word "Spamphlet" (a mash of "spam" and "pamphlet") to refer to the unsolicited handouts one sometimes receives when accosted on the sidewalks downtown. I'm not bragging that the new word is brilliant, but it's a more modern and enjoyable way of describing those unwanted items versus "tract" or "handout".

But with ginormous, there is no creativity displayed at all: The mashed words have nearly identical meanings, and the word produced by their union is yet another synonym. That isn't expanding the language, but merely cluttering it, like a person who gets three copies of "Huck Finn" and then claims to have a collection of works by Mark Twain. Think of the $100 bill, which once garnered the nickname "the C-note" (based on the roman-numeral "C", meaning "100"), later re-dubbed the "Benjamin" (a reference to Mr. Franklin, whose visage adorns that denomination), and how both new descriptions bring more color and playfulness to the English language. But by the ginormous method of word manufacture, that currency would become a "hundobill"---sure, life is short, but not so short that we need to save the time of two syllables with that clunky term.

It's the lack of newness that makes the use ginormous inexplicable: Why would one use the wrong word---or in this case, a non-word---if it sounds similar to and means the same thing as an existing English word? But perhaps its value lies not in what it is, but in what it is not.

Many of us have an gnawing suspicion that some of the people with whom we talk are marking our conversations with a red pen as the words come out of our mouths. We are all subject to the fear of appearing uneducated, and if we use a word with a real meaning, we can also misuse it---for instance, "that enormous matchbook" or "the gigantic cotton swab." Both of these are likely inaccurate (unless you're at a Ripley's Believe it or Not museum), and may expose the speaker as dictionary-challenged. But by using a non-word, the speaker has tossed Strunk & White out the window at the start---there's no misusing the word because the word has no actual meaning.

Think of diction as table manners: Attend a formal dinner and with each course you'll have to decide whether to use the salad fork, or the dessert fork, or the dinner fork; as the flatware inventory increases, the diner is faced with the awful prospect of exposing themselves as incapable of dining with the queen. But add a curling iron along side the plate and even the most snobbish will refrain from saying, "Did you see the barbaric manner with which he used that curling iron?" The curling iron has no correct or incorrect use as the dinner table, and thus all use of it is correct. (Though plugging the curling iron in before eating is universally frowned upon.) Obviously, ginormous is the curling iron in that analogy.

My adviser in college once told me, "It takes a great deal of courage to use the English language properly", his assertion based on the reality that our language suffers from so much widely accepted and regularly perpetuated misuses that wielding it correctly may cause the speaker to look foolish, supported by the style manuals but mocked by a group of people who think that stating "I'm not averse to it" demonstrates a hilarious lack of knowledge of the word "adverse." I suspect ginormous is a manifestation of that fear, a linguistic Golgotham conjured by speakers who seek protection from those judgmental coworkers and dinner guests who mistakenly believe that vocabulary is the hallmark of intelligence. (While it does reflect the attention paid in secondary school and/or a voracious reading habit, vocabulary is unlikely to help you compute the interest on your mortgage, solve a leak in your bathroom sink, or help you escape unscathed if you accidentally fall into the tiger cage at the zoo, so its value should be kept in perspective.)

Whatever the origin of this unnecessary etymological redundancy, I hope its life span will be worthy of measure by the Macarena standard. I fully support the continuing evolution of the English language, to the point where I'm even willing to let "shiznit" sneak through the door. But ginormous? 23 skiddoo.

©2008 wpreagan