Isn’t the English language “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”. That 34 letter word, sung so handsomely by Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke in the movie Mary Poppins, means wonderful. It is the longest non-medical, non-technical, non-foreign word in the English language. Did you get all that?
Well, that is unless you consider it not really a word, since it was made up by the two brothers who wrote the song for the Disney movie. In that case, the longest word is “antidisestablishmentarianism”, at 28 letters. Can’t you remember back in the 1950s or ’60s being so smug because as an eight year old you knew the longest word in the English language? That tongue twister originally meant, basically, opposition to the proposal to disestablish the Church of England. Yikes. Not to be outdone, some folks have added “pseudo” to the beginning of the word to stretch it to 34 letters.
In the category of English place names, there’s an 85 letter word for a certain hill in New Zealand. I won’t bother typing it. The two longest words in the entire English language are, well, a bit extreme. There’s a 189,819 letter word that is the chemical name for a protein. And the overall winner is the 280,000 word name for DNA, that molecular structure that embodies life. The word is so long that it reportedly has never been written. Duh.
We certainly have come a long way from the days when cavemen pointed and probably said, “Ugh”.
The evolution of our civilization is directly tied to the evolution of our sophisticated language. As communication became more effective, humans could interact better and progress was made. Of course, earth still had to endure millenia of slavery, savagery, and wars, but in the end things got better because we became better communicators. Ideas were able to be passed from one generation to the next, with each generation improving on the past. Socrates taught Plato, who taught Aristotle, who taught Alexander the Great, and so on. Later on, Leonardo da Vinci was followed by Copernicus, who was followed by Galileo. Continuing the procession of ideas and thought, Darwin was followed by Einstein, blah, blah, blah. You get the picture.
Without the continuing upgrading of language for the past 30,000 years, where would we be today? Schools wouldn’t exist, teachers wouldn’t teach, there would be no books, no pencils, no computers. We’d still be hunter-gatherers, living in small clans and wandering the land. Life would be eat or be eaten, stay warm or perish.
So as you read this, contemplate the 600 generations that improved communication. We exist as we do because the human spirit strived to be better.
- Mountain Man and City Girl
