Peter

Deng’s plan envisions the megalopolis of 13 million inhabitants [Shanghai, China] as a booster engine, towing the country’s midriff and north into the 21st century. (James Walsh, Nothing in Wang Hon Gwen’s Life Belittled Him So Much As …, Time International, 10/5/1992, p. 18.)

Mr. el-Sisi has ordered the Parliament and government ministries to move from the city center to a $60 billion administrative capital under construction in the desert, 25 miles away.Mr. el-Sisi insists the new capital will ease the pressure on Cairo, a bulging megalopolis of 20 million people. (Declan Walsh, “A Decade On, Silence Fills Egypt’s Field of Broken Dreams,” The New York Times, 1/23/2021.)

This word, when used with the above clarifier, can also be a synonym for dense, populated or city.…

Amid all the hubbub surrounding the defections of [two African-American studies professors] from Harvard to Princeton recently, it went unmentioned that onlythirty years ago, African-American studies as we know it today didn’t even exist. Although the Kulturkampf of the 1960s touched many academic disciplines, it was the creation of black studies programs that led to the most rancorous debates on American campuses. (John McMillan, Black Unlike Me [White Boy: A Memoir by Mark D. Naison], The Nation, 07/15/2002.)…

[In 1944, Alfred Kazin wrote an article] that will live long in the annals of that tenebrous time [i.e. the era of Nazi Germany]. “In Every Voice, in Every Ban” was a cry of outrage at the suicide of Shmuel Ziegelboim, the representative of the Bund who killed himself in London to protest the world’s indifference to the extermination of the Jews. (Author not given, Alfred Kazin, The New Republic, 06/29/1998.)

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“Deeelicious!” says [Tommy Lasorda], the 59-year-old manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, an epic trencherman who claims that he “never met a meal I didn’t like.” In fact he carries a spare fork in his back pocket, just in case he runs into a dish he can’t resist. (Todd Gold, Host: Next to His Family and His Beloved Dodger Blue, Tommy Lasorda Lives for Food — and His Restaurant, People, 07/13/1987, p. 103.)

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[This word is based on the stereotype of people from Gascon, France as being braggarts]. Italian journalist Luigi Barzin … cites Edmond Rostand’s fictional Cyrano as the quintessence of French character, at least as outsiders exaggerate it: the boastful, cocksure Gascon whose fellow provincials are defined in Rostand’s play as ‘’free fighters, free lovers, free spenders, defenders of old homes, old names and old splendors … bragging of crests and pedigrees.’’ (James Walsh, If Geography Is Destiny …, Time International, 07/15/1991, p. 8.)

This word, when used in the above sense and when referencing a person can also be a synonym for conceited, bravado, egotistical, showoff and swaggering.…