Jörmungandrian

From the abyss of Dear Dogberry page comes this shriek for help:

Being in the general proximity of Wimbledon you will doubtless have heard of the record-pulverizing match between Nicolas Mahut of France and John Isner of the USA, currently suspended at 59-59 in the 5th set. Our ESPN commentators were having a terrible time coming up with fitting adjectives: "epic," "freakish," a "battle royale," a "clash of wills," etc.. "Epic" yes, but not just any epic--after all, you could recite the Iliad all the way through in a mere 24 hours. Last year's final was epic. This match is Mahabharatan. At least, that's the best I can do. What say you? From your vast lexical treasury, your bathypelagic well of verbal resourcefulness, can you generate suitable superlatives? I eagerly await your offerings. Signed,

Dumbstruck in Delaware

Well, Dumbstruck in Delaware, I should begin by saying that Mahabharatan is a damned fine coinage. For readers who don't know (and I'm sure there's one of you), the Mahabharata is a Sanskrit epic that's about ten times longer than the Iliad. I like mahabharatan. I shall steal it and use it for my own sinful purposes.

Can I do better? I'm not sure. It's pretty easy to coin words for large. You find a large thing and turn it into an adjective. Gargantua, the giant hero of a book by Rabellais, gave us gargantuan. The Biblical monster Behemoth gives us behemothic. The Himalayas give us Himalayan and so on and so forth. But none of these words fit. They are all bulky, and the tennis match is long.

My best suggestion would be jörmungandrian. Jörmungandr is a snake from Viking mythology which grows so long that it encircles the earth and ends up biting its own tail. As I mentioned in a previous post the circumference of the earth is 24,901.55 miles, so Jörmungandr is very long indeed.

There's an added advantage that the snake biting its own tail is one of the mysterious symbols that pops up in almost every culture in the world. Mythographers call it the ouroboros and generally agree that its some sort of symbol of the infinite (or possibly of wisdom). That means that if you were captured by some strange and isolated tribe of Amazonian headhunters and forced, at hatchet-point, to describe the Mahut-Isner match you could confidently use the word jörmungandrian. The head-hunters might not understand you immediately, but they would doubtless have a cognate symbol in their own twisted and macabre mythology.

Well, Dumbstruck in Delaware, I hope that helps. And remember: having a bigger vocabulary doesn't necessarily make you a "better" person, what really matters is whether you can use that vocabulary to negotiate with tennis-obsessed cannibals.

 Dogberry

The Inky Fool engaging in pest-control