Look, being a whale isn’t all fun and games.
Sure, you’re the largest thing in the ocean and have no natural predators except for the occasional giant squid and, well, humans of course. Sure, there’s lots of swimming and hanging around and traveling the world, but it’s not always fun being the biggest animal around. Especially when you’re one of the smallest.
The dwarf sperm whale is the smallest member of the cetacean order or marine mammals1. And when we say small, we mean that the smallest ones found were just about two meters and 300 pounds. By way of comparison, manatees, beluga whales, and even some species of dolphins average longer and heavier stats. For that matter, there are some species of marlin or tuna that are bigger than that.
I had never heard of the dwarf sperm whale before I started writing this article2. No, what started this was finding the phrase a whale of a as a synonym under the entry for big at Thesaurus.com. Immediately, I had a scene from a non-existent Seinfeld routine in my head:
What’s the deal with having a whale of a time? What if it’s a beluga whale? They’re not that big! You’re not having a good time. You’re sitting by the punch bowl waiting to go home. You have to feed your beluga whale.
Yeah, this is why no one’s hiring me to write stand-up routines.
But I did get curious about the phrase (and about small whales). I suspected its use came from the golden age of sail when whalers were routinely sent out to sea for months or years at a time in hopes of bringing back valuable whale oil. And, in fact, it does. It’s earliest recorded use dates back to 1871, as per this post on Word Histories.net. However, another word blog, World Wide Words.org has linked the phrase to an earlier version that used whaler instead of whale3.
By the time the twentieth century rolled around, a whale of a had been firmly established as a standard comparison and had become associated with any number of big things.
In fact, when you check into a general purpose corpus, like the Corpus of Contemporary American English, you find the phrase has a fairly high frequency, appearing in collocations like, a whale of a job, a whale of a picture, and a whale of a game. Of course, various puns predicated on the aquatic nature of whales were also well-represented: whale of a splash, whale of a killer, and the all-too-familiar whale of a tale.
But leaving aside the literal whales for a moment, it’s interesting that in the big list of synonyms for big, amongst all the usual words like enormous, gigantic, massive, and vast4, sits this lone metaphor, begging the question, do metaphors count as synonyms?
Leaving aside the obvious yes stemming from the fact that I found the phrase in a thesaurus, let’s go back to basics: as we know, synonyms are two words that mean more-or-less the same thing. And synonyms can be absolutely synonymous (e.g. there is no discernible difference between using one word or another), propositionally synonymous (e.g. no difference in this one case), or nearly synonymous (e.g. they’re not exactly the same, but one will do as a quick substitute for the other in most cases.)
Under the same umbrella of synonymy, however, we find a few more terms for discussing how one word can have the same meaning as another: metonymy, synecdoche, hyponymy, simile, and, oh look, our old friend, metaphor.
The website ELTconcourse.com has a definition for metaphor I really like:
metaphor is the device of using language for an item which actually is appropriate only to the synonym one implies
English is rife with metaphor. It’s one of the cornerstones of writing and storytelling; being able to successfully compare one object or idea to another in order to create a meaningful comparison in the reader’s mind is a foundational skill for writing. It’s a tool that makes the written word a, uhm, er, blanket? No, no. Uhm. Duvet? Nah. Ah! Tapestry! Metaphor is a tool that makes the written word a tapestry, vibrant and rich and alive with warmth and depth.
It also sometimes turns mountains into molehills, spilled milk into tragedies, and whales into de facto units of measurement. In all these cases, the qualities and aspects of one thing are transferred to another, thus making them synonyms.
As for whales, well, there are big ones and little one and all sizes in between. Adjust your metaphors accordingly. It’ll be a modestly-sized right whale or a good deed.
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Moby Dick: Or, the Whale
by Herman Melville
Knock off the eye-rolling, you’ve never read it either. I’ve started to any number of times. I know several passages and scenes from it, but I’ve never actually read all the way through it. I’m hoping to change that this summer. Last year, I set out to read Don Quixote and thoroughly loved exploring a book so firmly entrenched in modern culture that most people are unaware of just how foundational to Western literature it is. I’m hoping for the same sort of experience with Moby Dick. We all know who Ahab is; we all know that the whale is a metaphor. Don’t we owe it to ourselves to learn where it all stems from? I think we do.
Hold the phone, apparently, the dwarf sperm whale is the smallest of the toothed whales. There is actually one whale that is actually even smaller, the vaquita porpoise. However, we have reached the sad end of my knowledge of classifying ocean going mammals so I can’t tell you why the dwarf sperm whale and the vaquita porpoise are both the smallest whales in existence.
Now that I have found them, I have a new favorite animal, but that’s beside the point.
Incidentally, the discovery and classification of the dwarf sperm whale dates to 1866.
This is starting to sound like the roll call for a twisted, neo-noir version of the Night Before Christmas: On Massive and Hefty, Huge and Humongous, on Burly and Bulky and Mammoth and Jumbo!