In reckless fracas with coquettish bream,
Ecstatic gargoyles, with grotesque chagrin,
Garnish the gruesome nightmare of my dream!
The Longest Words
The following sentence won a prize offered in England for the longest twelve-word telegram: “Administrator-General’s counter-revolutionary intercommunications uncircumstantiated. Quartermaster-General’s disproportionableness characteristically contra-distinguished unconstitutionalist’s incomprehensibilities.” It is said that the telegraph authorities accepted it as a despatch of twelve words.
The statement, upon the publication of a new English dictionary, that the longest word in the language is “disproportionableness” was met by pointing to a still longer word employed by the Parnellites at the time of the disestablishment of the Irish Church, in 1S71,—“disestablishmentarianism,” which found its way into the House of Commons, and another, quoted from a theological work,—“anthropomorphologically.” These are likely to hold the record, at least outside of the names of chemical compounds and their derivatives, such as trioxymethylanthraquinonic, or dichlorhydroquinonedisulphonic, which outstrip all reckoning.
There is an old farce called “Cryptochonchoidsyphonostomata” which was revived by Mr. Charles Collette, a London actor, several years ago, and was extensively advertised in the London press, to the dismay of the compositors and proof-readers.
One of the funniest long words is necrobioneopaleonthydrockthonanthropopithekology. That, of course, is not an English word, though it is in an English book,—Kingsley’s “Water Babies.” It means the science of life and death of man and monkeys in by-gone times, as well as one can make it out. It is a word invented by Kingsley.
The clown Costard, in Love’s Labour’s Lost, addressing the schoolmaster, says, “Thou art not so long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus.”
In Beaumont and Fletcher’s Mad Lover, the Fool says,—