A Laugh
This made me laugh this morning
Oversized apes are turning up everywhere these days, from speeches by politicians to articles in newspapers. These 800-pound gorillas -- along with some that are a little smaller, or a lot bigger -- are favorites of talking heads who apply the cliché to powerful people, companies and even movements.
Search the Web for just about every weight of gorilla in 100-pound increments from 100 to 900 and you'll find a lot of hits. (One of my favorites: "The Psalms are the 800-pound gorilla of evangelical worship.")
The gorillas divide, combine into one, lose weight and gain it back again. In a search of New York Times archives, I found a consultant, speaking about the Bell Atlantic-Nymex merger: "If you take one 250-pound gorilla and combine it with another 250-pound gorilla, you could end up with a 500-pound gorilla with fat thighs who may move slowly." About a law-firm breakup, a lawyer opined, "In reality, once the dust settles, the 800-pound gorilla simply becomes two 400-pound gorillas." A campaign consultant said of a politician, "He's not an 800-pound gorilla now, he's a 600-pound gorilla." (In 1999, American Journalism Review gathered gorilla sightings in the press.)
The Wall Street Journal has had fewer gorillas in its pages in recent years, but some of those that have appeared have been enormous. A letter last year referred to a 10,000-pound gorilla. And a 1996 article about PC games included a quote referring to Microsoft as the 6,000-pound gorilla. I asked the Journal's style guru, Paul R. Martin, about the apes. He told me he was "impressed that the appearances of the gorilla in the Journal were in direct quotation, so we weren't directly complicit in perpetuating the expression. As clichés go, I don't consider this one rampant in the Journal -- so far."
There doesn't appear to be any limit to just how big these gorillas can get. Several years ago, Willie Brown, then mayor of San Francisco, called the dot-com industry the 100,000-pound gorilla, though I'd like to see an updated weigh-in. In 1995, the Charlotte Observer called a passenger jet a 200,000-pound gorilla, which may have been an accurate weight but an incorrect species. Closer on both counts, the Associated Press once dubbed King Kong the 500,000-pound gorilla. Denver mayoral candidate John Hickenlooper was also a 500,000-pound gorilla, an opponent's campaign manager told the Denver Post in 2003. Mr. Hickenlooper won a run-off election with 69,526 votes, or one for every seven pounds.
Last year, the Roanoke Times & World News called car-tax relief "the 900 million-pound gorilla running amok in the Capitol." The Women's National Basketball Association was once improbably called a billion-pound gorilla, and in 1999, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist called Microsoft "the 900-billion-pound gorilla of computer operating systems." The biggest gorilla I could find is the U.S. economy, which former U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky in 1998 called the "seven-trillion-pound gorilla" -- one for each annual dollar of activity.
These gorillas clearly have been bred in captivity and fed a high-fat diet. Microsoft, the WNBA and the U.S. economy each dwarf the total weight of living, breathing gorillas, whose numbers have been dwindling even as their metaphorical counterparts expand. Bill Weber, a gorilla expert with the New York advocacy group Wildlife Conservation Society, says that adult male silverbacks, typically the biggest gorillas, usually weigh about 400 pounds. These estimates are imperfect, because as Dr. Weber notes, "It's difficult to get weights in the wild. They don't like standing on scales."
Just 650 to 700 mountain gorillas remain in the wild, along with four to five thousand eastern lowland gorillas and 50,000 to 100,000 lowland gorillas, Dr. Weber says. Even if all of them were typical silverbacks, they'd weigh about 40 million pounds together -- a far cry from Virginia car-tax relief.
Posts
