Literary notes about gargantuan (AI summary)
Writers employ "gargantuan" to evoke a sense of overwhelming magnitude, whether describing physical dimensions, emotional states, or metaphorical experiences. It can animate a character into the realm of legend—a figure whose laughter or presence is so vast that it alters the scene’s tone, as when a hero's massive laughter sends foes fleeing [1, 2]. The term also magnifies feasts, banquets, or even entire cities to extraordinary proportions, imbuing them with an almost mythic scale [3, 4, 5]. Additionally, "gargantuan" is used with a playful irony, measuring not only colossal architectural feats or monstrous spiders but also everyday experiences turned epic, such as a swift sneeze or a heavy-handed appetite [6, 7]. In this way, authors stretch the ordinary into the extraordinary, inviting readers to experience the world on an amplified scale.
- Sir Richard is a new type in literature—the Rabelaisian Paladin, whose foes flee not only from his sword but from his Gargantuan laughter.
— from Daisy's Aunt by E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson - The rest, after Gargantuan laughter, was silence....
— from The Borzoi 1920: Being a sort of record of five years' publishing by Inc. Alfred A. Knopf - Gargantuan banquets he describes, pending which the bowls of punch and claret imbibed appear to us something fabulous.
— from Picturesque Quebec : a sequel to Quebec past and present by Le Moine, J. M. (James MacPherson), Sir - It was a Gargantuan feast befitting a great occasion.
— from Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland by Joseph Tatlow - But, somehow, community life had sprung up in this most Gargantuan of cities.
— from Master of Life and Death by Robert Silverberg - A Gargantuan appetite suddenly pinched my stomach.
— from Miranda of the Balcony: A Story by A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley) Mason - He dropped his hand sheepishly when he realized it was only a sneeze—though a gargantuan [Pg 109] one.
— from Sense of Obligation by Harry Harrison
