More Like a Giant Lie!

Ladies and gentlemen, I am hopping mad right now. In my wrath, I am here to call out the scientific community for an affront that has plagued me and other likeminded people for some time now. I am here to accuse the arrogant scientists the world over for a crime against humanity I like to call “false identifying”. There have been several examples of this over the years, but the straw that broke the camel’s back takes the form of the recently discovered Giant Penguin. Or, more accurately, the so-called “Giant” penguin.

Here I am, surfing the great expanse of the internet, when I see one of the most searched topics for the day is something called the “giant penguin”. You can only imagine the excitement I exuded as I giddily clicked the link, hoping to see some sort of feathered behemoth, presumably attacking Tokyo. I was immediately, and not for the first time, disappointed. The giant in question was merely the fossilized remains of a bird that was approximately 5 feet tall.

Artist's Impression

Okay, fine, I get it; that is big for a bird. The average bird is often less than a foot long, and rarely weighs more than a few ounces. Most modern day penguins are rather small, with the largest species being the Emperor Penguin, which reaches a height just around 2 feet tall. I understand that for a bird to waddle around at about my height, that’s pretty impressive. But do we have to misleadingly refer to it as a giant? I don’t consider anything at 5 feet tall “giant”, and if it is, then I get to be a giant too. Giant is not “relative”; giant is concrete. A moth cannot be called giant if it’s 2 feet wide as opposed to 2 inches, it’s giant if it’s the size of Mothra. Can we just be honest and call it a Large Penguin, or a Jumbo Penguin, or a Rather Big Penguin, or a Penguin of Unusual Size? Big Bird is roughly twice my height, and we don’t even call him giant, we just call him “big”.

Artist's Impression

All this hubbub reminds me of one of my earliest childhood obsessions, and that was with the Giant Squid. For years, my young mind was filled with the tantalizing image of this mysterious, effervescent entity, this monstrous denizen of the deep. They called it giant, that meant it had to be huge! It had to be a squid the size of the Empire State Building! It was so cool, and the very fact that no one had ever seen live one at the time (or at least seen one and lived to tell the tale) simply added to the intrigue of this oh so rare giant. I marveled at this leviathan of the frozen deep for years and years until I made the relatively recent discovery that, guess what, is only a measly 13 feet, and most of that is tentacle length. What happened to the squid so big that in one gulp it could eat James Mason’s submarine? This massive disappointment in relative size of a mythical mollusk is probably the single greatest hardship I have ever faced in my life.

I thought I had learned my lesson. I thought that cynicism had taken its hold and would prevent me from ever being hurt again by the thoughtless sensationalism rampant in the animal naming industry. And yet here, again, I was misled by a beastly imaginative name, only to be abandoned at the threshold of reality. Bitterly disappointed, I am left to rely on my imagination to fulfill the broken promises I was tricked into believing by the scientific community, the recesses of my mind being the only sanctuary where I can truly find that giant penguin I was so desperately hoping for.

Artist's Impression

How many more generations are going to have go through what I went through. How many more dreams are going to be crushed because these scientists have to fulfill their own twisted need to over emphasize? From now on, let’s just make it a rule to only name something giant if it’s truly giant, and if it’s not giant, just call it “great big” or something. C’mon. We have a giant language, with plenty of synonyms for “big”. I’m sure you can find something that won’t break my heart.