Word: whaled
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Elephants leave a particularly durable image. As a boy, I accepted the skill of the acrobats, equestrian and trapeze artists with some indifference, but the elephants had bulk. Like the blue whale and the dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History, the elephant is an undeniably massive presence at the circus...
...child's smile, lighting up as he enters Euro Disneyland, knows no language barrier. Nor does the thrill of fear scooting up a young French spine at the sight of Monstro the Whale at Les Voyages de Pinocchio or the dragon in Le Chateau de la Belle au Bois Dormant (Sleeping Beauty's Castle). When a kid alights from the Big Thunder Mountain railway and exclaims "Genial!" everyone nearby can tell he means "Awesome!" You need no French diploma to read a gamine's serene exhaustion when she staggers out on penguin legs at the end of a 12-hour...
...been doing so for 1,500 years, making it at least half as old as a mature sequoia tree. The thing has already taken over a whopping 15 hectares (37 acres). It weighs in at somewhere between 100 and 1,000 tons, at least as big as a blue whale. And it is still growing. At its present creep, it could reach the city of beer and bratwurst in a mere 1.6 million years...
That is, until my folks decided they liked the name so much that they printed it on the back of a couple t-shirts. What a mistake. I vividly remember arriving at camp one morning, only to hear the bullies chanting "Jona and the whale! Jona and the whale." Poor Jonathan cried all the way home and never wanted to returned to camp again. Of course, Mom shoved me onto the camp bus the very next day, and little Jona has lived with the name ever since...
...outgrows blue jeans. American books, both pop and profound, can at times sell more in Japanese translation than back home in English. News is often seen through an American prism. Trends and movements sweep across the Pacific from America and take root. In Japan these days many people prefer whale watching to whale eating: environmentalism has arrived...