Herculean proportions?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Herculean proportions?

Speaking of “herculean task”, here’s one for you. Read Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and find out more about Heracles, a son of Zeus and the Greek gods and goddesses in general.

Reading Homer in English for the first time will be difficult, what with all the names of people and places that don’t make any sense to us Chinese. Indeed, it will take an effort of herculean proportions, so to speak.

However, the stories are so fascinating that, I promise, you won’t regret embarking on such a journey, ever. Also important to note, it will help us Chinese understand the Western psyche.

For now, let’s read a few media examples for herculean or Herculean as an adjective, for something big, huge, enormous, colossal, gigantic, gargantuan:

1. ABC News Anchor Peter Jennings died today at his home in New York City. He was 67. On April 5, Jennings announced he had been diagnosed with lung cancer.

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As one of America’s most distinguished journalists, Jennings reported many of the pivotal events that have shaped our world.

He was in Berlin in the 1960s when the Berlin Wall was going up, and there in the ’90s when it came down. He covered the civil rights movement in the southern United States during the 1960s, and the struggle for equality in South Africa during the 1970s and ’80s.

He was there when the Voting Rights Act was signed in the United States in 1965, and on the other side of the world when black South Africans voted for the first time. He has worked in every European nation that once was behind the Iron Curtain. He was there when the independent political movement Solidarity was born in a Polish shipyard, and again when Poland’s communist leaders were forced from power.