© 2024 KMUW
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

OnWords: Huge

I’ll try not to spend the next several minutes on the word “huge” just making fun of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. 

But I think The Donald’s obsession with “yoodge” things is a great example of how we think in the US of A.

For Trump, “yoodge” is a superlative. The implication is that if it’s big, it’s inherently good.

But, hey, the U.S. itself is huge! You could fit all of the UK into Kansas! How “great” are you now, Great Britain?!

The sheer number of massive SUVs and big-box retailers in this country indicates that, on the whole, we agree with Trump: Huge is good, and huger is better.

Arguably, this yoodge-o-philia is just because we have so much space to fill. We like big because we can. But other nations are also geographically big, like Russia and China, and they don’t harp on huge like us.   

They also don’t have our level of material competition: Here, you go yoodge to show the other guy you match up.

And the U.S. has no aristocracy, so Trump can’t just impress us with his title: He has to fall back on yoodge-i-tude to make us like him.

I guess the voters will decide if that’s enough.

Lael Ewy is a co-founder and editor of EastWesterly Review, a journal of literary satire at www.postmodernvillage.com, and a writer whose work has appeared in such venues as Denver Quarterly and New Orleans Review and has been anthologized in Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh.