I wish there was a term for exclusively male giants
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Provocatively, when Rebecca Sugar wrote her Sizey song for Steven Universe, she didn’t write “All I wanna do is see you turn into a giantess.” I don’t think we need to limit ourselves to a single-word term for “male giant” or “giant man.”
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I wonder if the French have a solution to this…
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@AnnDViant in French we say “géant” (male) and “géante” (female), always have. Sadly, there’s no real single word for a shrunken (or tiny) woman, which again hurts visibility and searchability. The closest we have is “lilliputienne” (i.e. an inhabitant of Lilliput, used as an adjective), but it’s not seen very often.
There’s also not much size literature in French, in our folklore or popular culture. Charles Beaudelaire did write a poem called “La géante” in his seminal “Les fleurs du mal” :
La géante
Du temps que la Nature en sa verve puissante
Concevait chaque jour des enfants monstrueux,
J’eusse aimé vivre auprès d’une jeune géante,
Comme aux pieds d’une reine chat voluptueux.
J’eusse aimé voir son corps fleurir avec son âme
Et grandir librement dans ses terribles jeux ;
Deviner si son coeur couve une sombre flamme
Aux humides brouillards qui nagent dans ses yeux ;
Parcourir à loisir ses magnifiques formes ;
Ramper sur le versant de ses genoux énormes,
Et parfois en été, quand les soleils malsains,
Lasse, la font s’étendre à travers la campagne,
Dormir nonchalamment à l’ombre de ses seins,
Comme un hameau paisible au pied d’une montagne. -
German, another language with gendered nouns, has Riese and Riesin for male and female giants, respectively. Oddly, German uses the same word, Zwerg, to refer both to IRL people with dwarfism and to imaginary people who are Tom Thumb-sized. And yes, a female “dwarf” is a Zwergin.
(Tom Thumb is Daumling (Thumbling) in the original German Kinder- und Hausmärchen by the Brothers Grimm)
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@Olo Yeah normie literature in French often refers to tiny/shrunken women as “naine”, the same term as women with dwarfism. I never liked that personally, I much prefer “lilliputienne”.
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@foreverlurk I went looking for an online German translation of Gulliver’s Travels and I found this. Who knows what we’ll get this time?
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@foreverlurk said:
I much prefer “lilliputienne”.
German doesn’t seem to like double consonants like those in “Lilliput.” Their words for male and female inhabitants of Lilliput are Liliputaner and Lililputanerin.
I bought the first hard copy of Milo Manara’s Gulliveriana I came across, which was in France. When Gulliveriana finally has her big disagreement with the Empress of Lilliput, she calls the latter a “Lilliputasse.”
