Gargantuanly
Language: English
Part of speech: adv
Forms: form: more Gargantuanly
form: most Gargantuanly
Etymology: From Gargantuan + -ly.
Senses: examples: text: “I haven’t the remotest idea.” / “Then how can you state so confidently that this painting is not a picture of his wife?” / […] “I can’t be positive, of course,” he returned irritably. “I know she wasn’t and that is good enough for me.” / Williams laughed, Gargantuanly good-humored. “You’re young, Mr. Norris, and you don’t like to think of youth mated with age. But it’s done quite often I assure you, and it was done in this case, too. Just look here. This is proof enough for me.”
ref: 1925, Marion Harvey, “A Friend in Need”, in The House of Seclusion, Boston, Mass.: Small, Maynard & Company, →OCLC, page 71:
text: No one, of course, can pass through life, however humdrum, and not be made aware of a great deal that is ludicrous; but if there is any place in the world where there is more of the egregiously funny to be met with than anywhere else it is on and beside the sea. The reason is apparent: the folk who do the hard work of the sea, the sailormen, are in their mental make-up so vastly more simple than the most simple of those who remain ashore that the contrasts engendered are Gargantuanly ludicrous.
ref: 1926 April 25, “Moods and Humors of the Sea Drawn by a Master Mariner: Captain Felix Riesenberg’s Threescore Vignettes Are Salty and Human Pictures of Sea Life”, in The New York Times, volume LXXV, number 24,928, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, section 3 (The New York Times Book Review), page 6, column 4:
text: On his large feet Marshal Feng [Yuxiang] stands a full, massive six feet tall. He towered Gargantuanly, last week, during his address to slender, slant-eyed students of both sexes at the New Nationalist University in Nanking.
ref: 1928 December 10, “China”, in Briton Hadden, Henry R[obinson] Luce, editors, Time: The Weekly Newsmagazine, volume XII, number 24, Chicago, Ill.: Time, Inc., →ISSN, →OCLC, “Foreign News” section, page 26, column 2:
text: And there is that vast, comfortable urge to dine Gargantuanly on black, slippery, upholstered seats in old brown brasseries, and through a long evening, cloudy with smoke and argument, behind beer in beakers and mountains of redolent, satisfying Teutonic fare, to let life roll by in pageant after pageant like a Wagnerian opera, full of thunder and magic.
ref: 1929, George Slocombe, “On Dining Out in Paris”, in Paris in Profile, Boston, Mass.; New York, N.Y.: Houghton Mifflin Company; Cambridge, Mass.: The Riverside Press, →OCLC, chapter VIII (Paris of the Gourmands), page 161:
text: Tides of ever-increasing height and violence surged up and up, gripping not only the tens of thousands of miles of solar atmosphere and photosphere, but also clutching deeper and deeper into the very quasi-solid interior of the suns themselves. And, as the stupendous tides mounted, so increased the sun-quakes and volcanoes; the Gargantuanly rumbling warnings of that which was to come from below.
ref: 1938 May, Edward E[lmer] Smith, “Catastrophe!”, in Astounding Science-Fiction, volume XXI, number 3, New York, N.Y.: Street & Smith Publications, Inc., →OCLC, page 127, column 2:
text: There came maulers; huge, ungainly flying fortresses of stupendous might. There came transports, bearing the commissariat and the service units. Vast freighters, under whose unimaginable mass the Gargantuanly braced and latticed and trussed docks yielded visibly and groaningly, crushed to a standstill and disgorged their varied cargoes.
ref: 1940 January, E[dward] E[lmer] Smith, “Gray Lensman; Part IV: Conclusion”, in Astounding Science-Fiction, volume XXIV, number 5, New York, N.Y.: Street & Smith Publications, Inc., →OCLC, page 105, column 1:
text: These men and their hundred-odd guests gather at Santa Barbara from all around the nation on the first Sunday of May and ride together into the mountains for a week of uninhibited fun. They live vigorously, feast Gargantuanly, roister lustily, sing mightily, spin tall tales around their crackling fires at night.
ref: 1946 May, Don Eddy, “Ride, Rancheros, Ride!”, in Holiday, volume 1, number 3, Philadelphia, Pa.: The Curtis Publishing Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 23, column 1:
text: I had a calling . . . a genuine self-atrocity / Of supernatural impingement. / I was a dupe struck dumb with awful awareness, / Collared by the gods, set upon the world / To babble, babble, babble soulful ironies / And Gargantuanly swollen subtleties.
ref: 1965 February 18, Martin Vieweg, “I Was a Prophet”, in Bruce Goyette, editor, Kampus Vue, volume X, number 5, Fitchburg, Mass.: Fitchburg State College, →OCLC, page 5, column 3:
text: More and more extravagant and obscene material was being accumulated as if to subvert aesthetic notions of civility and decorum with new ideals of inclusive grotesquery and excess. The contemporary liberal critic Havelock Ellis proposed an etymology of the ‘obscene’ as meaning ‘off the scene’. In Ulysses what would normally be excluded is included, and what would normally be repressed is expressed, and in this sense the book might be defined as triumphantly and heroically – Gargantuanly – obscene.
ref: 1992, Richard Brown, “Beginnings”, in James Joyce: A Post-Culturalist Perspective (Macmillan Modern Novelists), Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Education Ltd, →ISBN, chapter 3 (Ulysses), page 65:
text: Thus experience becomes literally ‘spectacularised’ by a paradoxical distance in bodily time while maintaining spatial proximity, again very like the perception of a film audience. As the narrator puts it, ‘the whole world had stopped for our convenient inspection’ (CSS [The Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells], pp. 493 and 496). Motion and gesture become defamiliarised, as in [Eadweard] Muybridge’s ‘animal locomotion studies’, Gargantuanly grotesque, as in screen-filling close-ups like G[eorge] A[lbert] Smith’s 1901 films, or ‘candid moments’: […]
ref: 2007, Keith Williams, “Optical Speculations in the Early Writings: The Time Machine and the Short Stories”, in H. G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies (Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies), Liverpool, Merseyside: Liverpool University Press, →ISBN, page 32:
glosses: Alternative letter-case form of gargantuanly.