Prodigious

According to a quick Internet search, there are twenty-two references to prodigious in Gulliver’s Travels.

I don’t know the exact definition of the word, but I do understand when a person is prodigiously drunk.

Anyway, prodigious dates back to c1487, according to the OED, and it has four different definitions, a couple having alternate meanings—ranging from the nature of an omen, portentous, to unnatural, abnormal, freakish, to enormous, immense.

Upon entering prodigious into ECCO, the search came back with 39,294 hits (a bit too much, eh?). Narrowing down the search to 1726, the date of Gulliver’s publication, 325 results are returned, with the texts resulting in a healthy mixture of literature and language, history and geography, religion and philosophy, and science, medicine and technology.

Since the results rendered are evenly spread, and most of the instances the word is used in Gulliver are in the context of describing either Gulliver’s size or the size of the Brobdingnagians as well as the strangeness of defamiliarization, perhaps it makes most sense to pick religion and philosophy.

Two interesting texts:

From Thomas Burnet’s “Sacred Theory of the Earth”: “For it is not imaginable what the Commotion of the Abyss would be upon this Dissolution of the Earth, nor to what Height its Wave would be thrown, when those prodigious Fragments were tumbled down into it.”

From “A Compendious History of the Old and New Testament, extracted from the Holy Bible”: “for a mighty Champion of the Philistines called Goliath of Gath, who was Six Cubits and a Span high, and of prodigious Strength, having defy’d the Champions of Israel for 40 Days, struck such a terror into them…”

Here are a couple of places where prodigious is used in Gulliver’s Travels:

“Without trembling at the very Sight of so prodigious a Creature as I must appear to them”

“Even this prodigious Race of Mortals might be equally overmatched in some distant Part of the World”

Neither the definitions of the word nor the texts that employ the word, shed any new meaning as to how it is used in Gulliver’s Travels. The allusion to Goliath in one of the historical texts does provide some point of reference to the Brobdingnagians and their size. Since Swift was well versed in the Bible—Old and New Testaments—one could assume he got the idea of gigantic people from the story of David and Goliath. The lack of fear, or rather courage displayed by David in the Bible is also exhibited by the Lilliputians when they deal with Gulliver. That is the extent of discovery I can garner from my research. Although I didn’t make any grand discoveries, the ECCO definitely is a useful tool for looking up words and how they have evolved, especially in the process of writing papers.