237: WORDS FAIL ME
(Afraid all that follows quite puts Fort’s famous ‘teleportation’ in the verbal shade)
In the finale (vv1168–75) of his comedy ‘Women in Parliament’, Aristophanes came up with this jaw-breaking noun:
Lo pa dote ma chose lac ho gale okra nio lepsa nod rim hypo trim ma to silphio pa eaomelioka ta take chyme nokic hi wpikossyphoph at to peru st era lek tryonopte kephalliokigklo peleiola goiosiraioba phetr ag an opt eryg on.
Allowing for minor vagaries of text and transliteration, this lexical whopper weighs in at 169 or 171 letters, long-time champion in the Guinness World Records. Meaning? Simply boils down to a multi-multiingredient fricassee served up for the play’s concluding banquet, defined by Liddell and Scott in their standard Lexicon as ‘Name of a dish compounded of all kind of dainties, fish, flesh, fowl’. Not likely to find that on a pub menu.
A glance at dictionaries of modern Greek suggests that latterday Hellenes have not yet broken the 30-letter barrier, an impression confirmed by relevant Wikipedia notices.
Latin can’t compete, though to judge by Horace’s animadversions ( Art of Poetry, v97) on sesquipedalian verbiage – in English, a complaint levelled against Dr Johnson – there were those who tried.
Greek-style compounds seem to have been a feature of the earliest Roman writers. A well-documented case in point was the poet Lævius who specialised in archaising tongue-twisters that do not make one regret he survives only in fragments. Samples of his vocabulary are listed and discussed by Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, bk19 ch7, concluding that such are all right in poetry but not right for prose.
Gellius’s litany of ever-increasing monsters culminates with Sub duct is up erci li carp tor, defined by the Oxford Latin Dictionary as “An eyebrowraising fault-finder”. Apparently too much to swallow for Lewis & Short, the OLD’s predecessor who left it out.
Despite his “small latine and less greeke,” Shakespeare’s longest word is this bit of cod Latin, spoken by Costard when ridiculing pedants in Love’s Labour’s Lost (Act 5 Scene 1): “O, they have lived long on the alms-basket of words. I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word; for the art not so long by the head as honorific a bi li tu din it a ti bus: thou art easier swallowed than a flap-dragon.”
I gather flap-dragon was a game in which you tried to eat hot raisins from a bowl of burning brandy – might catch on if revived. Bill’s weighty word comprises the dative and ablative plurals from a mediæval noun, translatable here as “the state of being able to achieve honours”.
Michael Quinion on his World Wide Words website points out that this was not actually the Bard’s invention, being attested in an 1187 Charter, in Dante and Rabelais, and an anonymous 1548 tract, The Complaynte of Scotland – tailor-made for Salmond and Sturgeon.
Quinion also discloses a Latin anagram within this monster that translates as “These plays, F Bacon’s offspring, are preserved for the world,” crediting this discovery to Sir Edwin Lawrence-Durning’s Bacon is Shakespeare (1910). Quinion sardonically observes: “This is all nonsense, of course – as every schoolboy knows, they were really written by Edward deVere, Earl of Oxford.” Yes, Michael, and every schoolgirl knows they were really written by Anne Hathaway.
Excluding scientific-technical compounds, the longest proper English word is usually said to be floccinaucinihilipilification, signifying ‘pettiness’ or ‘estimating as of little value’.
I traced its history in Verbatim 25.1 (2000), 23-4, accessible online. Sounds like a Johnsonian blunderbuss – the Great Cham did defend the use of “hard words” in an Idler essay, and Scotch hagiographer Boswell pronounced: “Mr Johnson has gigantick thoughts, and therefore must be allowed gigantick words.”
This verbal colossus was actually imported into English by one of Johnson’s poets, William Shenstone (1714-63), although supposed to be a coinage by pupils slogging through the Eton Latin Grammar, being a jumble of Roman phrases equivalent to our ‘not giving a jot/ monkey’s/toss for’. Used in a letter, not a poem, the word was revived after a 60-year hibernation by Robert Southey (1816) and Sir Walter Scott (1829).
Johnson was frequently ridiculed for his sesquipedalianism, being nicknamed ‘Lexiphanes’ after a character mocked in Lucian’s eponymous dialogue for coining monstrous neologisms. Our EtonShenstone effort was frequently surpassed by – no surprise – James Joyce, who has 10 100-letter confections in Finnegan’s Wake, led by a 101-oner describing the thunderclap signalling the expulsion from Eden of Adam and Eve – look it up yourselves or go to the exegeses of Anthony Burgess, the only person ever to claim he understood the whole thing.
If we included scientific compounds, the runaway winner is the definition of the protein Titin, clocking in at 189,819 letters. Haven’t had the courage to look into this, let alone spell it out, relying (fingers crossed) on the Wikipedia catalogue of longest words in various modern languages, unsurprisingly dominated by the likes of Finnish (how on Earth do even Finns learn this longitudinal lingo?) and German, though Sanskrit takes first prize with one of 431 letters, contrasting with (say) Arabic which does not reach beyond 15 letters.
Back to the Romans, who extended this hyper-verbosity to proper names, both in fiction and fact. In Plautus’s play ‘The Persian’ (Act 4 Scene 6. 20-23), a character introduces himself as:
Vaniloquidorus Virginisvenonides Nugipolyloquides Argentumexteribronides Tedigniloquides Mummorumexpalponides Quodsemelarripides Nunquampost reddides.
A somewhat anti-semiticallytinged Englishing in Paul Nixon’s old (1916) Loeb rendered some of this as “Girlsellerinsky, Cashqueezerouter, Whatyouhaveoncegrabbedstein, Neverletitgo again.”
One of the Roman consuls for AD 169 styled himself: Q. Pompous q.f. Senecio Roscius Murena Coelius Sex. Julius Frontinus Silius Decianus C. Iulius Eurycles Herculaneus L. Vibullius Pius Augustanus Alpinus Bellicius Sollers Iulius Aper Ducenius Proculus Rutilianus Rufinus SiliusValensValerius Niger Cl. Fuscus Saxa Uryntianus Sosius Priscus.
Try getting that on your ID Card….