You’re probably aware that massive is simply a slang term for great or large. But for one professional balloon artist who thought that something massive has to contain actual mass, it took some convincing for him to accept that his giant balloon sculpture could, in fact, be massive. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Massless but Massive”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Oh, hi there. This is Brian from Indianapolis, Indiana.
Welcome, Brian. What’s going on in Circle City?
Oh, I have a question about the word massive. I have a little disagreement with a friend of mine, and we wanted some clarification there.
Okay. What’s your disagreement? Why are you talking about massive?
Well, I am a professional balloon artist, and so is my friend Joey.
Wait a minute. Wait, what?
Professional? You make a living at it.
I make a living out of it. Yeah, this is my career. This is what I do all year long, and it’s my only job.
Wait, what?
That’s awesome.
Wait, no, what does a professional balloon artist do?
We’re not talking hot air balloons. We’re talking kids’ parties?
You’re not painting things on balloons. Are you blowing them up? What are you doing?
We blow them up, and then we do sculptures out of them. I work at restaurants, birthday parties, company events, colleges, universities. I do just about everything there.
But my favorite thing to do is these really, really huge sculptures. My friend Joey and I work on them often, and we call them super sculptures. And they’re things like a 3,000 balloon roller coaster or a full-size biplane or a full-size elephant, all made out of twisting balloons.
For real? How long does it take to do that?
It depends on the sculpture. Our longest one that we’ve done so far took 110 hours. I was actually on a huge project with some other balloon artists led by another friend of mine that took 75 artists four days, and that took 55,000 balloons.
What were you making?
Oh, my gosh. That one was Jack and the Beanstalk.
Of course.
That is crazy.
And I bet that was massive.
Yeah, that’s the question there. So my friend Joey always describes these. We’ll be talking on the phone. We’ll be heading down to Fort Myers, Florida, where we do a lot of our sculptures. And he says, oh, man, this one’s going to be massive. Or when they see how massive that sculpture is, they’re going to be really impressed.
And I always point out to him that, too much to his annoyance, that they aren’t massive. They’re large. They’re gigantic. They’re huge. There’s a whole bunch of different adjectives that you can use, but not massive.
Why not?
Because massive denotes that it has mass, that it has a lot of mass, that it’s very heavy. So we both come from a bit of a science background before we went into balloon art.
Of course.
He was pre-med. And so we both understand the science there. But I claim that it’s a term that comes from mass. And he claims that it’s just something big.
Anything big is massive.
Yeah. Brian, I’m going to have to agree with your friend here on this because there’s a couple things happening here. One is just because the word comes from mass doesn’t mean that it has to completely retain that original meaning. Two, words can have more than one meaning, and this one does. And three, there’s at least 500 years of massive meaning just impressive or great or just tall or otherwise being very something.
I think of it as British, massive.
Yeah. That was massive. In modern English slang, it is very British. All throughout the British Isles, actually, massive, being used in the same way that they use brilliant, just to mean really good or really great.
Right, right, right.
Interesting.
But, hey, it gives you something to talk about on those long drives to Florida, right? I hope there’s nothing on the line, though, Brian. It’s just that, you know, the word is far removed from its roots in many modern-day kind of pedestrian uses.
Sort of like epic.
Yeah, exactly like epic. Yeah, a lot of our words do this. I kind of expected that it was more of a modern sort of thing, math being more of a scientific sort of meaning. But he’ll be happy to know that he wins. But unfortunately, nothing on the line there for him.
You know what, Brian? We’d love it if you’d send us some pictures of some of your proudest work. Are you on YouTube? Are these performance art things? Can we find you on YouTube?
Yeah, I’ll go ahead and send you a link to some of my sculptures. My website is bryansballoons.com. And that’s got a link to the portfolio there of all the really big stuff.
Thank you so much, Brian. Good luck.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
We’d love to hear about your interesting line of work and the language you use in it. Call us at 877-929-9673 or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.
