Size Matters
Last time, I wrote about two-letter words. I subsequently came across this interesting entry, published back in June 2007 at Amazing Posts, which focused on words considerably longer. In fact the spotlight was on the longest words in the English language.
The longest word ever to appear in the English dictionary is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis at 45 letters long. This disease, an inflammation of the lungs caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust, is also known by its shorter name, silicosis.
It is easy to imagine why no one remembers the longest word in second place.
Admittedly, once you get past pneumonoceteracetera, everything else is somewhat anticlimactic. But, for those who enjoy word play, there are a number of other interesting words to pull out on an exceedingly slow night when the only other option is reading Henry James.
Everyone knows that ‘e’ is the letter that appears most often in the English language. Simply because it is there, a number of authors have taken on the challenge of writing entire novels without using the letter ‘e’. The earliest, Gadsby, was penned by Ernest Vincent Wright back in 1939. In 1995, Gilbert Adair published A Void, a translation of George Perec’s French-language mystery, La Disparition. Neither the French nor English version contains the letter ‘e’.
So, down to the bite-sized, the longest English word that does not contain the letter ‘e’ is floccinaucinihilipilification. This one, meaning “the action or habit of estimating as worthless”, weighs in at a welterweight 29 letters.
If, by the way, you think you cannot do much with words like this, you are wrong. Take out a couple of affixes, then add in a couple of new ones and you get new, wonderfully evocative words: floccinaucical (”inconsiderable, trifling”) and floccinaucity (”a matter of small consequence”). You will note that neither contains the letter ‘e’.
Not quite the same challenge, but interesting still are dermatoglyphics, misconjugatedly and uncopyrightable, each 15 letters long, tied for the longest words in which no letter appears more than once.
Aegilops is the longest word with its letters arranged in alphabetical order. Spoonfed is the longest word with its letters arranged in reverse alphabetical order.
Esophagographers, 16 letter long, is the longest word in which each of its letters occurs twice.
And so it goes. And goes and goes, with the longest word in alphabetic order, the longest palindromic word, the longest homophonic anagrams, and – to really stretch the point – the longest words that consist of only letters with ascenders, descenders and dots in lower case (lighttight and hillypilly).
Well, for now, that’s about the size of it.
Two for One
True Scrabble fans know enough legitimate two-letter words to really annoy the casual player. To even the odds ever so slightly, I will list a dozen or so twofers, with definitions.
Not surprisingly, many, like Ti, a woody plant native to the Pacific islands like Samoa and Tahiti, are not your English garden variety words but ones that emerge from the remote corners of our linguistically fertile planet. As you seed the board with these short but sweet exotica, you can show that you are both well-versed and well-traveled.
There are animals, running the full spectrum of the alphabet, from Ai, a South American three-toed sloth, to Zo, which is a Dr. Suess-like cross between a yak and a cow.
For the esoteric, Ba is the eternal spirit in Egyptian mythology. Qi (pronounced chee as in, but different than, tai chi) is the Chinese life force. Another mystical universal force is Od, sometimes manifesting itself in supernatural phenomena. (This, by the way, is not Odd, another universal force manifesting itself in the unnatural behaviour of various aunts on my mother’s side.)
Everyone knows an Em is a printer’s measure, but most don’t know that an En, also a printer’s measure, equals half an Em.
Yes, Fa is a perfume, but it’s also the fourth note in the diationic scale (do re mi fa so…) and perfectly acceptable Scrabble fare. As are Greek letters like Mu, Nu, and Xi. Xi should not be confused with Xu, a Vietnamese coin. Xu, by the way, is also the plural of Xu; you may get called on it.
Another weird one is Gu, a violin played in Shetland, an archipelago off the northeast coast of Scotland. It comes with a bonus: you can also spell it gue and gju.
It’s now time to finish off your frustrated foes. You can continue to bury them bit by bit with your Ko, a Maori digging stick, or cut directly to the chase with a Da, a Burmese knife that would make Crocodile Dundee proud.
When you’ve got dozens of two-letter words down, it’s your choice.
What’s On Your Bookshelf? - Part II
Okay, so you splurged on a library wall of gorgeous antique bookcases that transformed your den, giving it a touch of old world charm. Perhaps an Italian Renaissance-inspired design, made of solid wood in a dark chestnut finish, enriched with antiquing wax and gold painted border highlights. Some are open shelves and some covered by lead pane glass fronts. Oh yeah, and since they run 8 ft. high, you also got a ladder and installed ladder rails for easy sliding.
Displayed prominently on these bookcases are the literary classics. Your Dickens collection, the Russians and, of course, the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. They must be given their due and this means appropriate positioning. Especially those with proper leather binding, fading somewhat from evident use rather than from bleaching in the sun.
What, however, do you do with the weird books, the arcane and the obscure? Do you file Titania’s Book of White Magic alphabetically. Under what subject heading would you fit Browser’s Book of Endings? Where do you put your Tao of Pooh?
In my collection is the small but precious Bizarre Books, compiled by Russell Ash and Brian Lake and published by Pavilion Books (London, 1998). Any number of the titles listed would create havoc with your inner Dewey.
The specialty books are easy to file. It is easy to imagine a strip mall including The Care of Raw Hide Drop Box Loom Pickers; Wall Paintings by Snake Charmers in Tanganyika; European Spoons Before 1700; Locomotive Boiler Explosions (always engrossing, sometimes disturbing); A Toddler’s Guide to the Rubber Industry (Alice in Rubberland?); and the essential Umbrellas and Parts of Umbrellas Except Handles (a Report to the President of the United States).
In keeping with the interests of this blog’s readers, we do offer some madcap literary miscellanea: Selected Themes and Icons from Spanish Literature: Of Beards, Shoes, Cucumbers and Leprosy; Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France; A Compendium of the Biographical Literature on Deceased Entomologists; New Teeth for Old Jaws: Bookselling Spiritualized; An Irishman’s Difficulties with the Dutch Language; and, my favourite, So Your Wife Came Home Speaking in Tongues?
Now, be honest. Would you really try to keep these treasures under wraps or would you have them front and center, a full frontal trove of trivia and tripe for compulsive browsers?
What’s On Your Bookshelf?
My wife and I have begun the process of de-cluttering our home. Going through old clothes is one thing, old books another. I have decided to take an hour or so every now and then to look over our various bookshelves…including the ones buried in the basement. You know…the ones that contain old text books from university, the books your kids left behind, that Britannica of which you were once so proud but that has, with the passage of time and the reconfiguring of space, become an historical oddity.
My wife felt that I could not be trusted alone with the books, that I would almost certainly be distracted by their charms and sooner rather than later go derelict on her. She was, as always, correct.
I found dozens of treasures and more than a few oddities. Here are just two, from our literary collection, to start things off.
Restoration and Augustan Poets: From Milton to Goldsmith. I would normally have avoided any anthology that included Dryden, but this one did have Milton and, most importantly, Alexander Pope. Pope was then and remains today one of my favorite writers, less so for his mock-heroic classic, The Rape of the Lock, and more so for his philosophical musings. From his Essay on Man and his Essay on Criticism come countless aphorisms for which, Literarian readers know, I have a weakness. The essays are the sources for countless gems that have today become almost clichéd: “A little learning is a dang’rous thing”; “To err is human, to forgive, divine”; and “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread”.
The Restoration and Augustan periods also encompass the Graveyard Poets, the gloomy folk whose meditations on mortality, epitaphs and worms are now considered precursors to the Gothic novel. Unexpectedly – how did I miss it then? – one of the editors of the collection was a certain W.H. Auden.
Tucked demurely into a corner of one bookshelf was a tiny leather-bound book entitled The Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff Esq – Revised and Corrected by the Author (Richard Steele). To enjoy this, a little background is necessary. Isaac Bickerstaff Esq was a pseudonym used by Jonathan Swift. His biting satire was at its best when he took aim at almanac publisher John Partridge. Angry at Partridge’s swipes at the Church, “Bickerstaff” first predicted his nemesis’ demise, announced it publicly and finally published an elegy to his memory, though, all the while a much-beleaguered Partridge was still very much alive. Steele boosted the launch of his newspaper, The Tatler, by putting Bickerstaff on the masthead as editor. Swift did, in fact, contribute to The Tatler, but it was Steele who did most of the writing. Lucubrations is a collection of excerpts from The Tatler.
The book’s dedication is to The Right Honourable William Lord Cowper, Baron of Wingham. If the name seems familiar, that’s because Cowper was an Augustan poet. It’s a wonder how things come together.
Cowper was hardly a great poet and would never, on his own, have made my collection. His hymnizing, however, did produce the invariably misquoted “God moves in a mysterious way” line (from the Olney Hymns, ‘Light Shining out of Darkness’). Actually, his best line was “God made the country, and man made the town”. Cowper’s religious leanings led him to associate with John Newton who is best remembered for his classic hymn, Amazing Grace. That is as close as the troubled poet ever came to amazing or to grace.
There were other neat discoveries which will feed into future posts. Right now, however, I have to get back to ‘work’.
