Scale and Proportion: Shrinking, Looming and Being Dwarfed

Scale and proportion concern the size of something in relation to something else. An imagined obstacle may grow, a person may shrink, or an unchanged object may dominate a scene. Comparing these descriptions involves asking what changes size, what provides the comparison and what the resulting proportions allow.

This page develops the scale dimension of Situational Relational Positioning. The comparisons below are editorial reading examples, not a system for assigning meanings to another person's imagery.

Changing the traveller’s size changes the possibility of passage through an unchanged opening. Original comparison, CC0.

Size, proportion and viewpoint

“The wall became taller” and “I became smaller beside the wall” can both describe a growing mismatch between a figure and an obstacle. They locate the change in different places. A third description, “The wall filled my view as I approached it,” changes distance and viewpoint without requiring either object to change size.

Being dwarfed is a relative description: something appears very small beside a larger presence. The comparison needs both terms. A boat can be large beside a swimmer and small beside a ship. An account that only says “large” leaves its reference point unstated.

The following examples were written for this article.

Description	What changes?	What remains to be established?
“The task has grown into a mountain.”	The task is presented through increasing scale.	The available route, equipment and time.
“I feel tiny beside the task.”	The speaker describes their own relative size.	Whether the task itself has changed.
“The doorway is too narrow for this box.”	The proportions do not permit passage in the stated arrangement.	Whether another orientation or opening is available.
“From the hill, the buildings looked small.”	The description supplies a distant viewpoint.	The buildings' actual dimensions have not been said to change.

Alice: size and access

In Chapter I of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice finds a small door leading to a garden. She is initially too large to pass through. After drinking from a bottle and shrinking, she discovers that the key is on the glass table, beyond her reach. Chapter II brings another change: she grows so tall that getting through the door is again impossible.

One way of comparing these episodes is to separate fit from reach. Becoming smaller makes the doorway a possible passage but leaves the key inaccessible. Becoming larger changes what Alice can reach without making the passage usable. This is an editorial reading of the events: the story supplies a particular arrangement, rather than a general rule that growing is helpful or shrinking is harmful.

Expressions and their implications

• Loom: Cambridge records both a large, potentially unsettling appearance and an approaching event that causes concern. An approaching deadline can therefore loom without possessing a measurable physical size.
• Make a mountain out of a molehill: the idiom presents a minor difficulty as having been exaggerated. In a conversation, that judgement belongs to the person using the expression. The phrase alone does not establish that someone else's difficulty is minor.
• Put something in perspective: the conventional expression concerns judging something through comparison. A reading can ask which comparison is being introduced and whose viewpoint it represents.

Questions for comparing a passage

• Is the figure changing, the surrounding scene changing, or the viewpoint changing?
• What is the figure large or small in relation to?
• Does the description concern size, importance, visibility, strength or access? Which of these does the wording actually support?
• What becomes reachable, passable or hidden at the stated scale?

Related pages

• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
• Distance and Proximity: Closeness, Separation and Reach
• Situational Relational Positioning
• Elevation
• Doors, Gates and Thresholds
• Hills and Mountains

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