Every time he hears the words Big Society on the television or radio, my husband shouts out ‘Pig society!’ I am unsure whether he is inspired by George Orwell or the Earl of Emsworth’s Empress of Blandings.
Every time he hears the words Big Society on the television or radio, my husband shouts out ‘Pig society!’ I am unsure whether he is inspired by George Orwell or the Earl of Emsworth’s Empress of Blandings.
But if the Big Society is a great idea and not just a big idea why should it not be the Great Society? After all, we live in Great Britain, not Big Britain. I know that people watch Big Brother, eat Big Macs and sell the Big Issue or apply for grants from the Big Lottery Fund. But some also enjoy the great outdoors, go on the Great North Run, look back to the Great Train Robbery or the Great Depression, live in Great Malvern or Greater London and go to visit the Great Pyramid or Great Wall of China.
Some uses of great denote bigness, but few uses of big denote greatness. The Oxford English Dictionary refers to ‘the modern colloquial substitution of big for great’. That remark was carried over unrevised from the first edition of July 1900 to the second edition 89 years later. It can hardly be said now that big toe is a colloquialism for great toe. Once upon a time, 1,000 years ago, great toe was a colloquialism for mickle toe, as King Alfred called it.
Big crept into the territory of great by stealth. Great Tom, the bell in Oxford that rings 101 times each night, was recast from the bell that once hung at Osney Abbey and inscribed ‘Magnus Thomas clusius Oxoniensis renatus Aprilis VIII MDCLXXX’. Clusius means, ‘gate-closer’, since it rang the curfew. By 1859, when the Houses of Parliament first rang the bell in its tower, it was nicknamed Big Ben, not ‘Great Ben’.
The names of some birds, such as the great spotted woodpecker, retain great by a sort of fossilisation. This applies more enduringly to proper names, such as the Great Bear, or to names of places, such as Great Snoring, or of streets, such as Great Portland Street. New streets, no matter how broad, do not attract the adjective great, but nor are they called big.
Phrases employing big admiringly are rare. Perhaps an exception is the jocular big enchilada, apparently popularised in 1973 during the Senate hearings into the Watergate scandal, when John Ehrlichman was heard on tape saying of John Mitchell, the Attorney General, ‘He’s the big enchilada.’ But even in a Big Society, I suspect a prime minister would prefer to be remembered as Cameron the Great rather than Big Dave.
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