Gulliver's Travels
by Jonathan Swift
Gulliver's Travels |
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| Big-Endian / Little-Endian | In Lilliput (Part I),
Gulliver learns of a schism over the question of whether to break
soft-boiled eggs at the small or big end. When part of the population
resists the edict to change the end they break, civil war results (I:4;4).
Thus Swift satirized the religious schism created by Henry VIII's break
with the Roman Catholic Church, leading eventually to the English Civil
War and the Glorious Revolution.
Today, the terms refer generally to any conflict over trivial differences, adhered to with religious zeal. Adherents in a modern computing conflict over byte order in messages have actually self-identified themselves as "Big-Endians" and "Little-Endians." (See On Holy Wars And A Plea For Peace" by Danny Cohen.) |
| Brobdingnagian | Brobdingnag is a nation of giants, discovered by Gulliver in Part II. The people are sixty feet tall and everything else sized proportionately, on a scale of one foot to one inch. Thus someone will occasionally call a really huge object "Brobdingnagian." The term is original to the Travels. |
| Gulliver | Gulliver is a real family name, though the character is fictional. However, it is not a common name and most references to Gulliver originate with Swift's book. Thus, "gulliver" is a cheat code in the game "Greed" which makes all your enemies small. There are numerous Gulliver travel agencies (where none of the principals have that family name). There is a children's magazine called "Gulliver," probably because of the association as a kid's story. And someone has named a "voyaging powerboat" "Gulliver," a bad idea given the character's experience at sea. In A Clockwork Orange the street slang for head is "gulliver," a phonetic substitution for "golova," Russian for head. |
| Japan | The Travels may be notable as the first work of fiction to feature Japan as a setting. Japan is mentioned in passing in earlier fictional works (Ben Jonson's Staple of News is one case) and was also discussed at greater length in travel writing which often crossed the border into fiction. The distinction may be blurred further if you take into account that the Travels is a parody of travel tale. Even so, it remains that Swift is the first westerner to set a work of fiction in Japan. |
| Laputa | Swift invented this name -- probably meaning "whore" -- for the flying island of Part III. Though the place comes off badly in Swift's story, the idea of an island floating in the sky has a romantic appeal. Subsequently, there is "Laputa: Castle in the Sky" an animated adventure story from Japan. Flying islands are not original to Swift, but he was the first to attribute scientific principles to its flight, according to Isaac Asimov |
| Lilliputian | Swift invented the term Lilliput, the name of one of the two diminutive kingdoms in Part I. The people were about six inches tall and everything else to the same scale (one inch to one foot). Thus something tiny or in miniature is said to be "Lilliputian". |
| the moons of Mars | "They have likewise discovered two lesser Stars, or
Satellites, which revolve about Mars..." (III:3;9)
One of the mysteries of the Travels is its description of the Laputan discovery of the two moons of Mars, which would not be observed in reality for another 150 years after Swift's book was published. Swift was probably neither psychic nor original in this prediction, likely having copied speculation by Kepler and others popular at the time. The idea was that the further out in the Solar System the more moons a planet would have. Earth has one, Jupiter was thought to have four, then Mars should have two. Simple. However, Gulliver continued his report, "whereof the innermost is distant from the Center of the primary Planet exactly three of his Diameters, and the outermost five; the former revolves in the space of ten Hours, and the latter in Twenty-one and an Half;" which turned out to be remarkably accurate. Not so simple. For more on Gulliver and the moons of Mars, see "Sources: Science." |
| "the thing which was not" | In Part IV,
Gulliver encounters the Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses so
rational "... they have no Word in their Language to express Lying or
Falsehood." (IV:3)
"That the Use of Speech was to make us understand one another, and to receive Information of Facts; now if anyone said the Thing which was not, these Ends were Defeated;" . (IV:4)By chance I recently came across the phrase in Wilkie Collins's Woman in White (1859-60). It appears in the narrative of Hester Pinhorn. "I know that is is a sin and wickedness to say the thing which is not..." Was this an homage from Collins? |
| Yahoo | the term, now used to refer to a brute or a bestial human, was invented by Swift as the name of the race of sub-humans or de-evolved humans Gulliver encounters in the Land of the Houyhnhnms (Part IV). |