The longest word
The other day I was talking to an English speaking Russian and she wanted to impress me with how well she spoke English and started telling me jokes in English. Now humour and poetry are two of the hardest things to translate. Poetry, because you have to worry about so many different things:, rhyme and rhythm as well as the meaning of the words. Jokes, because humour depends so much on context and cultural background.
One tradition of English humour relies on the use of puns, a “play on words”, where one word is used out of its usual context or sounds like another with a different meaning. Anyway, the jokes turned to puns.
At one point she asked: “What is the longest word in the English language?”
Now, I knew the answer top this one … it’s typical schoolboy humour, the sort of joke with which I was well acquainted … but I kept quiet and let others in the group come up with suggestions.
Maybe, like me, you were told as a child that it was antidisestablishmentarianism, (… “the belief which opposes removing the tie between church and state”). That comes in at twenty-eight letters.
(It always struck me as odd because I couldn’t see why you couldn’t make the word longer, turning it into a negative by adding the prefix “non” … )
As it happens, this is by no means the longest word in English. There are longer words. As you can probably understand, most of the contenders for this coveted title are not words that are found in common usage. Many are technical and some are compound words, (made up by combining smaller words to convey a meaning). Quite a few are made up words, coined specifically for the purpose of being a long word – if not the longest. The German and Russian languages often create new words by combining others like this.
One such contender is Supercaligralisticexpialidocious – which contains thirty letters. It became famous as it was a the subject of a song composed by the brothers Richard and Robert Sherman for the 1964 Walt Disney film version of “Mary Poppins” … although an earlier version seems to have existed – and was defined by them as: “the something you say when you don’t know what to say.” (In this sort of situation my father would exclaim, “Well, I’ve got a bloody hell!”, and another friend of mine would say, “The things you see when you haven’t a gun!”)
The longest word in many of the major English language dictionaries is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, a 45 letter word which refers to a lung disease which people get from inhaling very fine silica particles, specifically from a volcano. There are suggestions, that it was coined specifically to make it a contender for the longest word because, medically, it is exactly the same as silicosis.
There are even longer ones, such as Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, (at thirty six letters), Apparently it means “the fear of long words”, which is quite ironic.. They should have made it shorter.
Some people argue that, although they are longer, we shouldn’t count technical terms and chemical names because they are specialist and not really part of “English, as she is spoken” … for example, there is one protein which has a name of 189,819 letters – but I am not going to try and type it.
All of these are, as it happens, irrelevant … assuming you are not researching the entry for the Guinness Book of Records, then the answer to the conundrum is … smiles … OK, I know that only has six letters, but “there is a mile between the first and last letters.”
Here’s an example of how humour depends upon cultural aspects. For most Russians, (and Europeans for that matter), the humour is lost because it depends on an understand of the Imperial system of weights and measures as opposed to the Metric which is used in most of the world. Try explaining that a mile is 1976 yards … a yard consists of 3 feet and a foot (‘foot’ … not ‘feet’) has 12 inches … even if they know the words ‘yard’, ‘foot’ and ‘feet’, the word ‘inches’ will often leave them confused and dumfounded. Tell them that a mile is about 1.4 kilometers and they tend to smile … because they know it’s supposed to be a joke and that is what you do when you hear a joke, but you can almost read the message written across their forehead, “what was the psychiatrist’s telephone number?” I well understand their bemused state … I well remember the first time I heard someone described their height as “one-sixty”, (meaning 1 meter and 60 centimeters), … and I just stood there thinking “what on earth is he talking about?” Although he was standing in front of me and I could see how tall he was, and although I was a Maths teacher and understood the Metric system, I was still taken aback and, for a moment, wondered what he was thinking about. It is hard to tell how the joke will survive if Britain ever adopts kilometers in place in miles to measure distances.
One other advantage that the word over its competitors is that it is a lot easier to spell!
There is another issue here, as well … although she smiled as she revealed the answer to the conundrum, this was quite unusual.
Unusual? – well … yes, in a way. This is not something I would have noticed or commented on except that a couple of clients have mentioned it to me only recently.
The first had spent ten days cycling around the country and when we met in Bishkek, he commented on the tremendous differences between the capital city and the rest of the country. That, in itself, didn’t phase me … being a “small town boy” who spent some seventeen years in “the big smoke”, (London), I was more than well aware that there is a huge difference between life in the capital and elsewhere … it was distinctly notable on the roads as one approached the M25 Orbital Ring Road around the capital, the driving seemed to be become faster and more aggressive, if not more reckless. It’s the same in France. I have visited France many times over the years and often been struck by the dramatic change in atmosphere and pace of life that can be observed as one travels between Paris and the provinces. Indeed any big city, not just a capital city. So why should Bishkek and the oblasts of Kyrgyzstan be any different?
However, he went to make another comment: that people didn’t seem to smile very much. At first I thought he was still talking about the contrast between people in the big city and those in the regions, People in big cities tend not to smile … Even if life is more varied and cosmopolitan; the pace of life faster, with more opportunities and the standard of living often higher, big cities tend to be more anonymous and impersonal. Life can be more competitive, demanding and emotionally draining. I made a comment about it being the same in most big cities. “How often, for example, do you see someone smiling on the London Underground?”, I asked.
However, he soon put me right. It wasn’t just a feature of “big city life”, he said, but something he had noticed throughout his trip. Perhaps, he suggested, life is so terribly difficult that people don’t feel they have much to smile about.
Another client made a similar observation, making a joke about needing a government decree giving people permission to smile. He began a game of “I Spy” awarding himself five points for every smile that he saw … and commented that he hadn’t got into treble figures.
(Incidentally, he also looked out for, and awarded himself points for other things like families walking out together instead of just the mother and children.)
That set me thinking … and I have to admit that they have do a point … Don’t misunderstand me, people DO smile – but it tends to be a private thing rather than something for public display. You do see children smiling as they run around and play games, or young courting couples smile as they promenade through the city’s parks, but these are smiles to be shared with friends and close acquaintances rather than with the people around. For public occasions it seems as if people adopt a sort of “fixed smile”, such as a ballet dancer might adopt whilst straining to perform some particularly difficult and strenuous manoeuver.
It reminded me of the old advertising campaign slogan: “We don’t smile because we are serious about making you happy.” (!)
Although one might be tempted to feel admiration for the sentiment being expressed, it seems to me that this misses the whole point. A smile is like sunshine … it doesn’t cost us anything but it is really pleasant to be on the receiving end of, and can make a real difference to how we feel.
Apparently, Japanese Railways have learned that this is not the right approach … not only do they require their staff to smile, they are even experimenting with what could be called “smile-o-meters”. At the start of each shift, the staff sit in front of a video camera attached to a computer and then practice an interaction with clients. The computer scans their face and analyses their smiles, and awards them points …
The Chinese have also learned the lesson well. Whereas almost any encounter with bureaucracy in China used to be a somewhat dour experience, nowadays, clients enthuse about the attitude of the border staff, customs and immigration, how helpful and cheerful they are and what a pleasant experience it was.
Bishkek