He's puny, Ben, looks like a dwarf, but I'd never heard of XL so I thought I might be on my way to meet an internet perv or summink".
Architectural critics had been complaining for years that as buildings had grown in height, their cornices had started looking puny.
Iñárritu's Birdman lost out to Richard Linklater's Boyhood last year for Best Picture but The Revenant has a scale and vision about it that leaves most of the other nominees this year looking puny.
For while corporate Japan spent the past few years restructuring, a global M&A binge created multinational giants in many industries, often leaving Japanese firms looking puny by comparison.
No generation was ever so studied, and yet, the more we got quantified, the punier we looked.
"My nest egg is looking pretty puny," a 57-year-old secretary from Irvington said.
But as computer hard drives grew, those removable disks wound up looking pathetically puny.
Across from him, looking relatively puny despite his mixed martial arts build, is Jozy Altidore, he of the whole two goals scored for his Premier League team, a young man of whirring feet and a highly erratic finish.
One day the writer came home to find the parrot looking rather puny & learned that it had suddenly flown at his mother's shoulder while she was cooking & she had knocked it out with the spoon in her hand.
Beckett's spare, short "Endgame", on the other hand, doesn't have to advertise its audacity; that much simply exists in a play whose maverick tendencies leave Mr Hastings's pretensions looking especially puny.
But Brussels politicking is looking increasingly puny compared with recent exploits of some local politicians, choking under the threat of EU sanctions.Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, the mayor of Madrid, was recently accused by state prosecutors of having air pollution monitoring stations moved in secret from busy road-side locations to the verdant tranquility of the city's parks.
