Brobdingnagian

Brobdingnagian \ˌbräb-diŋ-ˈna-gē-ən, -dig-ˈna-\

adjective: marked by tremendous size

My life just got so much better with the discovery of this Brobdingnagian word. And no, I’m not just saying “this (insert word) word,” I’m saying the word Brobdingnagian is, itself, Brobdingnagian, and that’s just amazing. Also, according to my oh-so-sophisticated-knowledge (*cough spell check cough*), Brobdingnagian must be capitalized to be correct. So, no, I’m not just copy-pasting it every time from the capitalized version because it’s faster than writing it. (Although…)

I’m absolutely positive I’m not the only one who discovered Brobdingnagian today. Why? Well, because I heard it from the inimitable Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) of The Big Bang Theory, which NBC was playing reruns of it for an hour in between local news and the start of the Olympics–an hour which just so happens to coincide with many peoples’ eat-dinner-in-front-of-the-TV time. And this scene happened. It was wonderful.

So, let’s get down to using this sucker!

The Brobdingnagian scale of the thing was jaw-dropping–who knew zits could get that big?

or:

Staring up at the mountain, its Brobdingnagian glaciers miraculously stuck to its granite walls, I couldn’t help but feel a bit like a Lilliputian lost in the human world.

So where did this lovely world come from? Well, the same place as Lilliputian. (See what I did there?) Brobdingnagian, unlike many words, has an origin which is insanely easy to pin down: Gulliver’s Travels, 1728. It springs from Jonathan Swift’s invented word Brobdingnag, which he used to describe a land where everything was gigantic. Cool!

I have a feeling Brobdingnagian is going to have a Brobdingnagian impact on my vocabulary. And, most likely, on that of a good number of of NBC’s Olympics-viewing audience.