Pylimitics

“Macro-” is a prefix meaning large or intensified in some way. It comes from the Greek “makro-” (long), which is also the source of the Latin “macer” (lean). Macer itself is the source of the English word “meager,” which, paradoxically, means scanty; not enough. Almost the opposite of “macro.” 

There are a great many English words beginning with “macro,” from “macroeconomics” to “macrobiotic.” But some of them are not quite so pedestrian; “macrophobia,” for example, is the seldom-encountered fear of waiting a long time (the sentiment is probably a great deal more common than the word). And while “macrocephalous” means an unusually large head, “macrotous” means only very large ears. The ears might go along with “macrural” (having a long tail) or “macropterous” (having large wings). Any of those characteristics could describe a macrobian individual as well — that means long-lived. In general it’s better not to fixate on just one characteristic or another, but to take the whole macrocosm into account. That’s what you do if you’re engaged in macromancy, which is divination of the future by using large objects. How large the objects need to be is unclear, but it could be influenced by macromania, which is the delusion that objects are larger than they really are. Like, I don’t know, the size of the nuclear button on your desk, perhaps. 

However, some “macro” words don’t indicate size or length, at least not obviously. A “macroscian” is someone who lives near the north or south pole. But if you look more closely, “macroscian” DOES have something to do with length — it’s literally “someone who casts a long shadow” (from the Greek word for shadow, “skia”). If you live at the poles, the sun is always low in the sky, which makes your shadow longer!

And then there’s “macropodine,” which, of all things, means having to do with kangaroos. The Latin classification of the kangaroo family is “macropodinae,” and there are a couple of derivations like macropodine that relate to kangaroos. As you might guess, the whole classification is also size-related — it means “big footed.” Biological classifications are almost always something like that; a serious-sounding Latin designation that turns out to mean no more than “those animals have big feet” or “that bird chirps like it’s drunk”; things like that. Saltem, Latin has been used for centuries to sound profound without actually being profound.