Vocabulary In the News : 29 September 2009 – Daily Press (Hampton Roads, Virginia USA)

Click on the image for a larger view of the front page. To visit the homepage of the Daily Press, go to : http://www.dailypress.com/

- A dead, 25-foot humpback whale recently beached near Gloucester Point in the York River in Virginia. A lot of onlookers (des spectateurs) are braving the stench to take look at the dead whale. The headline uses a play on words with ‘whale.’ Because the odor is very bad, they say that there’s a whale of a stench. Because the whale is the largest creature on earth, we sometime idiomatically use the word in the expression ‘a whale of’ to mean large, big, a lot of or great. So, when it says there’s one whale of a stench, it means it smells very, very bad! Take a look at other example sentences using this expression :

- It was a wonderful party! We had a whale of a time this weekend!

- That was a whale of test; it was very difficult.

- Chicago will take on a whale of a project if they are accepted as host city for the 2016 Olympic Games.

http://www.dailypress.com/news/gloucester-county/dp-local_whale_0929sep29,0,6242341.story