Recently reading an old-timey Ellery Queen mystery, I stumbled across yet another nimble fat man allusion:
“As the District Attorney closed the door the occupant of the room wheeled about with astonishing agility for a man of his weight.” This cliché appears in The Roman Hat Mystery (1929). The “astonishing agility” reminded me of a blog I authored in late 2022. It follows with a few revisions.
A Literary Curiosity: The Nimble Fat Man
Have you, when reading fiction, wondered why the author invariably describes a fat man as nimble?
To compound the cliche, some authors add “surpisingly”.
I have seen this countless times.
Here are several I picked up in a quick Internet search:
“Although he was fat, he was very nimble.”
“He was one of those men who are surprisingly nimble despite massive weight.”
“Moving with that nimble quickness peculiar to many fat men .”
“If he had not been wondrous nimble for a fat man she would have caught him…”
But nimbleness is not just limited to the feet:
“Standing at the table , the fat man opened the book with his thick but surprisingly nimble fingers.”
Is this a result of an author’s insightful observation of fat people or is it an attempt to ameliorate with something positive what could be seen as fat shaming? Or, like the scudding clouds cliché, it’s a banality we just can’t rid ourselves of. (Yes, I know.)
Not to exclude the ladies, here’s a titillating inclusive titbit from 1930*:
“She was breasting the stairs with a celerity surprising in one so plump, and her rather protruding blue eyes positively bulged with excitement. She looked like nothing so much as a fat Pekinese, aquiver at the sight of food.”
(A delicious Wodehousian excerpt from The Case of Sir Adam Braid By Molly Thynne)
And, another quote from Ms. Thynne:
“Moving with surprising quickness for one of his ponderous build, he hurried from the dining-room …”
Is this fictional nimbleness applicable to morbidly obese organizations?
An example:
“For an organization steeped in decades of bureaucratic tradition it was surprisingly nimble when it came to justifying a larger budget.”
Want to see an elephant dance, stand on its head, and do back flips? Come to a budget hearing!
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N.B. For other essays on numerous other topics go to my Nucleus archive from 2010-early 2025.
© Copyright all text John Lubans 2022 & 2025