常時英心:言葉の森から 1.0

約10年間,はてなダイアリーで英語表現の落穂拾いを行ってきました。現在はAmeba Blogに2.0を開設し,継続中です。こちらはしばらくアーカイブとして維持します。

puny 復習

今の世界に初代のゴジラがやってきたら、どのようになるのでしょうか。

The original Godzilla would be drafted by modern Tokyo.

When Godzilla first rose from the ocean depths to wreck havoc on an unsuspecting Tokyo in Ishiro Honda’s Gojira, it was 1954. It was just nine years after World War II, and the country was far from its current role as a formidable leader in technology and engineering. So Godzilla, standing just 50 meters (164 feet) high, towered over everything in Tokyo. But sixty years later, and Godzilla as he first appeared would be puny compared to Tokyo’s skyscrapers of today.

Original Godzilla has now been placed among the buildings of 2016 Tokyo. The monster is shown to scale alongside in the Shinjuku, Tokyo Station, and Shiodome districts. As you can see, Godzilla looks less like the terrifying nuclear monstrosity it was meant to be and
more like a lost child exploring a big city. He’s actually kind of cute!

Of course, Godzilla has grown in the last sixty years, meaning the King of the Monsters can still maintain his reign. Legendary’s Godzilla which has a sequel on the way, stands at 108 meters, while Toho’s Shin Godzilla releasing this month from Neon Genesis Evangelion director Hideaki Anno is measured at 118.5 meters. Still, if the Big G didn’t take his vitamins and kept his size from 1954, he’d be pretty puny.

https://www.inverse.com/article/19236-original-godzilla-would-be-tiny-in-2016

今回取り上げる単語は、puny/pjúːni/です。最初のパラグラフと最後のパラグラフに使われています。

ジーニアス英和辞典』(第五版,大修館)で調べたところ、「小さくて弱い,取るに足らない,ほんのわずかの」などと載っておりました。

Oxford Dictionary of English (Second Edition Reserved, Oxford University Press)によると、 “small and week”とかなり短い定義が載っておりました。

以上から小ささと弱々しさを同時に表しているのではないかと思います。

記事中の比較写真を見てみると、ゴジラがかなり小さく見えます。(Gomez)

puny ⇄ galore - 田邉祐司ゼミ 常時英心:言葉の森から