Next, " to be swamped with something" , a swamp is this wet magic ground where you can get stuck and drown, so if you're swamped you have too much of something, too much work, too many tasks.
It's not like we have some magic electromagnetic shrink ray, like professor Wayne Szalinski used in " Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" to shrink his children.
It was something magical about the subway. You might step into a train station, and as you're waiting for the train, this train comes in and it looks like an art show.
When Gayla Peavey sang about wanting a hippopotamus for Christmas, she must have met one like the pygmy hippopotamus from a zoo in Thailand, which just went viral because, well, baby pygmy hippo.