英语词汇gargantuan的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

gargantuan. Broad, coarse exuberant humor and sharp satire mark the Rabelaisian spirit or style. The word honors the pro- digious French humanist and humorist François Rabelais (ca. 1490–1553), who “drank deep as any man,” of life as well as wine. Rabelais, whose voracious appetites would have sufficed for any two ordinary men, started out as a Benedictine monk, later turning physician, but his reputation rests on his ribald writing, a paean to the good life—love, drink, food—a satire on the bigotry and blindness of Church, state, and pedant. Gross and noble at the same time, marked by vast scholarship, his masterpieces are Pantagruel (1533) and Gargantua (1535). The last book, though Gargantua had been a figure in French folk- lore, gives us the word gargantuan—“enormous, gigantic”—from the giant prince of prodigious appetite, who was 11 months in the womb, as an infant needed the milk of 17,913 cows, combed his hair with a 900-foot-long comb, once ate six pilgrims in a salad, and lived for several centuries. Pantagruel, Gargantua’s son, is just as famous and classic a character.

词汇	gargantuan
词源	gargantuan. Broad, coarse exuberant humor and sharp satire mark the Rabelaisian spirit or style. The word honors the pro- digious French humanist and humorist François Rabelais (ca. 1490–1553), who “drank deep as any man,” of life as well as wine. Rabelais, whose voracious appetites would have sufficed for any two ordinary men, started out as a Benedictine monk, later turning physician, but his reputation rests on his ribald writing, a paean to the good life—love, drink, food—a satire on the bigotry and blindness of Church, state, and pedant. Gross and noble at the same time, marked by vast scholarship, his masterpieces are Pantagruel (1533) and Gargantua (1535). The last book, though Gargantua had been a figure in French folk- lore, gives us the word gargantuan—“enormous, gigantic”—from the giant prince of prodigious appetite, who was 11 months in the womb, as an infant needed the milk of 17,913 cows, combed his hair with a 900-foot-long comb, once ate six pilgrims in a salad, and lived for several centuries. Pantagruel, Gargantua’s son, is just as famous and classic a character.
随便看	white house white knuckle driving white lie white list white-livered white man-s burden white meat white mountains white rhinoceros white shark white slavery white thumb whitey whiz whodunit who he whole ball of wax whole enchilada whole hog whole kit and caboodle whole megillah whole nine yards wholesale whole shebang whole shooting match