Brobdingnag

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A fictional land created by Jonathan Swift where giants reside, representing a world of exaggerated proportions and absurdity
2. An imaginary place from literary works characterized by its inhabitants' immense size, satirizing human nature and society
3. A narrative setting depicting a society of giants, used to humorously critique the flaws and follies of human civilization

Etymology: Jonathan Swift invented Brobdingnag in "Gulliver's Travels," published in 1726, and he made it a country of giants. When Lemuel Gulliver lands there, he finds himself a tiny figure among people roughly twelve times his height, who treat him as a curiosity or a plaything. The name is Swift's own coinage, and it has no known source in any earlier language. Its sound seems to have been chosen to suggest something large and grand. The place works as a satirical mirror. Gulliver, who has been proud of his own nation, is confronted by a king who finds European politics and institutions laughably petty, and who questions how such small creatures could do much harm. Swift uses the vast scale of the Brobdingnagians to make ordinary human vanity and cruelty look absurdly small. Because of this, the name has outlived the book as a shorthand. Writers use it to describe anything enormous, and the word now carries the satirical sense of a world in which everything is magnified.