Pantagruelian

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Characterized by extreme abundance and excess, especially regarding consumption of food and drink in remarkably large quantities
2. Involving excessively lavish amounts of food and drink served or consumed in enormous quantities
3. Marked by extraordinarily excessive indulgence in eating and drinking to an immoderate degree

Etymology: Before Rabelais made him a giant, Pantagruel was a small devil. In fifteenth-century French religious plays he was an imp who crept up on drunkards and threw salt into their mouths to keep them thirsty. When François Rabelais borrowed the name in 1532, he kept the thirst and made everything else enormous. The book appeared that year in Lyon as "Pantagruel", under the anagrammatic pen name Alcofribas Nasier. It told of a giant prince born during a drought so severe that the earth sweated. Rabelais supplied a mock-learned etymology: "panta", Greek for "all", and "gruel", which he claimed meant "thirsty" in the tongue of the Hagarenes, so the name meant "all-thirsty". Before the baby himself emerged, his mother brought forth a train of mules loaded with salt, then dromedaries and camels hauling hams, smoked tongues and eels. The infant drank the milk of thousands of cows at every meal and once devoured most of a cow before anyone could stop him. The theologians of the Sorbonne condemned the book for obscenity. Two years later Rabelais gave his giant a father in "Gargantua", the source of English "gargantuan". Rabelais himself had a gentler idea of what his hero stood for. In the later books he coined "pantagruélisme" and defined it as a certain gaiety of spirit steeped in contempt for the accidents of fortune: a cheerful indifference to bad luck, not a bottomless stomach. English met these books through Sir Thomas Urquhart's translation of 1653. "Pantagruelism" sometimes kept its author's sense of jovial philosophy, but readers remembered the feasts better than the philosophy. By the nineteenth century the adjective pantagruelian was in English use. It could still point to Rabelais's jovial, satirical spirit, but its dominant sense became eating and drinking on a heroic scale. The two family words have quietly divided the inheritance. Gargantuan describes size, and almost anything can be gargantuan: a debt, a building, a task. Pantagruelian mostly stays at the table. It belongs to banquets, appetites and thirsts, which is fitting for a name that began as a devil with a fistful of salt.