you are still pericles—



wailing nations of id,



you will assure them,



 



‘just chemicals’



even,  that all that greens



inside your bulbs—it rancid,



it dastardly savor. narrowing



 



nations, and you got that



itch to dance crushing



underfoot infant



nodes of energy. they compelled to



 



death-wish undertow, they



hide themselves—in the ruins—



 



if you don’t do well with



diorama, this earth is not



for you.



 



this has always



been the same—



ajax showed you, continuity



 



is a cult of personality and you



will subscribe.



 



onion-headed or not.



 

The yellow light in the lobby moves through the door’s framed glass and out into the street at midnight. It understands my shape on the asphalt out front, with my outline propped delicately over the sidewalk, whose burnished edge looks weirdly razor-like in the glow. My hand is on the glass behind me, and the heat from my fingertips gets pulled off in moist prints on its surface. The door closes with a hard sound, and I take the three steps down slowly. The night is brisk and dry. All along the Seventh Avenue sidewalks, lampposts form a colonnade that guides the eye toward Flatbush Avenue on the right and the Prospect Expressway overpass on the left. Overhead, stars defy the bright communion of the metropolitan night, shining.



  I’m already walking toward Flatbush Ave. when I realize that there won’t be any cabs tonight. I’ve stayed later than I should have, I know: longer than I usually do on nights like these. The walk uptown is long and strange, and there is something about the particular air that settles in the streets at night that fills men with a sense of death or cosmic loneliness. Maybe I should’ve stayed, tried to patch things up. Maybe that’s what she was hoping for, keeping me there so long. I can still go back.



  It’s been this way for three months, but it only feels like a couple of weeks, and it could have actually lasted for a half-century the way it all cycles back on itself. We won’t speak to one another for days, a couple weeks at most, and then she’ll call. Sometimes I call too, but I’ve tried not to these days. She’s sensed it. She doesn’t even pretend to have reasons anymore. And then I’m there, and a cigarette is lit and a cockroach is smashed and a star collapses and we’re screaming at one another as if nothing had changed, as if we were still together. Or we’re so quiet we could both be underwater. The period that Ellie and I were together is most easily remembered as the period where we were breaking up.



 And tonight is the same, but maybe she really does want me to hit the buzzer, to apologize and we’ll go to bed and wake up in the morning baffled and miserable and smiling like machines. On either side of me, the night renders the dignified and crumbling facades of the old brownstones completely obscure. I can still go back. The light inside the slouching afterthought of the Seventh Ave. subway stop is bright and depressive; a light that strikes out against secrets. Inside the turnstile, there is a sort of abbreviated antechamber tiled from ceiling to floor in off-white ceramic with hints of flower-vine patterning at the eye level. An almost life-and-a-half sized wooden bench, wrought with illegible carvings and magic marker scrawl, sits on the landing between two staircases. The left, a sign indicates, takes you to the platform for the Q and B trains running uptown, toward Manhattan, toward home. The right, says another, leads to the same trains running downtown, through Sheepshead Bay and Brighton Beach, past the Aquarium, all the way to Coney Island.



I’m not going back. In this truthful light, I study the blue blood beneath my skin, and I’m filled with the giddy and melodramatic impulse of all true children: to become lost beyond all responsibility. I am certain I will board the next train that arrives, and I’m certain that it will take me downtown, towards disaster and Coney Island. I imagine Ellie waiting up countless hours until she decides that I really have gone home. It’s satisfying enough to know that she’ll be wrong. I erase any thought of rest or reconciliation from my mind. Already it feels as if I’m about to board a spaceship, momentous and apocryphal.



I can hear the nondescript rumbling of the Q moving into the station, and I take the stairs to the downtown platform, where a boy with green slacks, white t-shirt and an olive complexion is standing beneath one of the only working bulbs on the platform. The youth’s hands are in his pockets. He could be about 15, but tall for his age, and he stares past me as if I were invisible. His eyes are black, or appear to be, and his mouth is shut tight. There’s something about his posture that makes him look either highly dangerous or chronically ill. When the train finally pulls in, he never moves. I walk past in silence, watching him. Maybe he has some other agenda. There’s no one in my car when the automated bell sounds and the doors of the train slide shut. Maybe he’ll get the next one. It doesn’t matter. The trains run all night.



We move. The night is indifferent to elaborately vandalized concrete walls of the trench that accommodates the BMT Brighton Line, and the only thing I can see in the window is the reflection of the car’s interior; empty plastic bucket-seats, vertical handrails, rows of leather hoops along the aisle, and my own face. Above the windows, advertisements prod those passengers absent of mind or without any other recourse, “Earn Your GED,” “Give Blood,” and “Ask For Help.” On another, a cheerful blond child is running through the spray on a beach somewhere warm with the caption, “Jimmy Doesn’t Know He Has Lymphosarcoma.”



The last time Ellie and I went out together, when she was still living with me, we rode the train after midnight back from a late movie at a revamped peep-show theater in midtown. She insisted that we take a cab, and I can remember using a sort of dismissive, parental tone I knew would irritate her. She wouldn’t talk to me then, not even about the movie, which I knew she had loved, and which I knew I had ruined for her. It was a surf-flick from the 1950’s called “Hang Ten For Two” starring a bronzed half-Latin heartthrob named Johnny Lamar. The main character was a shy surfer-girl who tries to impress the beach crowd by surfing on her hands during high tide at the infamous Big Lip Cliff. But she doesn’t realize that there’s a shark in the water, and in the nick of time Johnny Lamar paddles in to the rescue, cruising back to shore with a foot on the nose of each of their boards, performing the title’s trick—the ‘hang-ten-for-two.’ Afterwards, there’s a luau and a barbeque, and the film’s final shot is the silhouette of Johnny and the heroine in an intimate embrace as the sun goes down. Ellie always had a way of getting embarrassed at how much she enjoyed things; I could see tears in her eyes as Johnny played guitar around the campfire. She looked beautiful then. I had regretted it, felt sick to my stomach about it even as I belittled her, but that never changed anything. She had put her things in boxes a week later. After a few stops, I remember a place my grandfather used to talk about from when he lived around this neighborhood, and I get off at Ocean Parkway to see if it’s still around.



  It’s a short walk down a few blocks of single-story cafes and all-night Chinese groceries where men of indeterminate age sit behind counters, utterly motionless. The bar occupies a small section of an otherwise-vacant complex whose tenant could have been a YMCA or an insane asylum. The edifice is plaster matted in concrete for three stories up, and above the sign that says “Odd Hour Tavern & Grille,” I can see the bottom half of an enormous mural of a black and gold mermaid that covers the whole side of the building. She has long blue hair replete with starfish and wistful gray eyes. A man in a heavy flannel shirt leaning against the wall outside the door is smoking a cigarette and seems to be laughing at me but he doesn’t make a sound. I ignore him and go inside.



The Odd Hour is clearly a locals-only dive, evident from the huddled conversations that collect at its corners. Its back wall is taken up by a bar whose arms reach outward at either end across half the width of the room, leaving a serviceable space in the center with tables and stools. The bar is at capacity, so I order a drink and sit at a table where two people are talking; a man in a black turtleneck and a blazer, and a woman in a blue dress who only seems to nod.



I spent most of last year in Buenos Aires, working for a friend who owns a hotel there. Beautiful country, really lovely people.”



Uh-huh.”



 “Of course, I couldn’t speak a word of Spanish. It wasn’t too difficult getting around though, especially in the city, where most of them speak English anyway.”



 “Uh-huh. I’ve always meant to go.”



The city was beautiful, but only parts of it really, you know? Parts of the region are still undeveloped, so the outskirts tend to be pretty seedy. Filthy, even. I’d say that for the most part, Buenos Aires is a filthy city, with some beautiful parts.”



Filthy, yeah.”



And you get that way too. It’s not just the place. It gets on you, you know? On your clothes. It’s in your food. I was taking showers twice a day, on average. I couldn’t stand the way I smelled and I didn’t want to get used to it. When it got hot enough, which it did plenty of the season, even though its supposed to be winter there when it’s summer here, I would have to stand on the roof of the hotel just to get above the smell of the garbage.”



I’ll bet you couldn’t stand it.”



 “I couldn’t fucking stand it sometimes. Disease too. Something like 60% of the people between 18 and 35 have a venereal disease of some kind. And none of them get treated. One of the clerks had to take off work because of an untreated case of syphilis. This is supposed to be a democratized nation—the Americas are supposed to be developed. It’s worse in the mountains too. And don’t get me started on the rats.”



No, I don’t think I want to go there.”



It’s the same everywhere, really.”



Anywhere.”



It’s enough to convince me that these people are either schizophrenics or some sort of malfunctioning animatronic puppets, and I take my drink to the stool at an end of the bar that’s opened up. I sit elbow to elbow with a woman who, unless I’m deceived, is strikingly beautiful. She wears a long gray dress that barely reveals the tips of a pair of black flats, and short brown hair in bangs over a sharply featured face. Her eyes are green. She seems to be staring at me—back at me.



Never seen you around here,” I say automatically.



 “Nice try,” she smiles.



How about a drink then?”



I already have a drink.”



Right, well. It’s a standing offer. It’s extended, like, temporally, you know?”



You’re funny,” she rolls her eyes.



That’s not the way the metal men here talk.”



The lushes around here have their own language. I don’t pretend to understand it, but how they unwind is their business. I saw that Oskar over there was entertaining you.”



They shouldn’t let a guy like that on the airlines. He’s a paranoid for sure.”



They don’t. Oskar lives with his mother. He’s never left the city. The threads are his deceased father’s. He watches the Travel Channel obsessively.”



You his nurse or something?”



He’s got a new story every week. I can do math. We get the Travel Channel in my building too.”



And where is your building?” I say, with a smile. Risks are the type of thing that one takes in a new environment.



My building is in Shangri-La, pal. Why don’t we start with names? And where’s that drink?”



Lily laughs at my dumb lines, one after the other. I haven’t used some of them in years—haven’t had to. Even when we were barely speaking to one another, I found the idea of infidelity with Ellie repulsive—beyond forgiveness—mostly because I knew how it would crush me if I ever heard something on the other end. But tonight I’m free, and I’m as lost as I can be, and the faces down the bar are like masks of solemnity and confusion, as if a funeral procession had forgotten the name of the departed, and all stood still for a moment longer than they could to ever escape. And the two of us are alive and real. I can feel in her mocking laughter the grain of softness that could be affection or love or nothing. Before the end, Ellie accused me of being an essentially methodical person; “You’ve always already made up your mind about someone, and that’s why you’ll never reach out to anyone. I feel sorry for you.” If I had wanted to say something back, it would’ve been, ‘It’s extraordinary that you know how to break what’s already broken.’



The drinking has come to the point where physical pain is no longer an issue. Lily keeps ordering a drink called a ‘Cyclone’ and I keep paying for them. I’ve let my advances fall by the wayside—I’m forgetful, if nothing else—and I’m becoming restless. I suggest we go for a walk.



I don’t know if I’m equipped for that,” she indicates a third empty cocktail glass. “You should probably just take me home,” she says in complete seriousness.



Shangri-La?” I can’t help but smile.



Charming. No, Beverly Road. You’re going uptown anyway, right? Manhattan? Mr. Heartbroken. The trip won’t take so long with some company.”



She fits herself underneath my arm and asks that we walk slowly. I forget about Coney Island and every promise I’ve made to myself. I kiss her once, gently on the lips, and she smiles. Clouds are growing paler out over the sea. Our shadows are faint and doubled by the overlapping orange light of the lampposts. We walk past the cafes and the groceries all over again, and the mermaid diminishes and finally disappears at the turn onto Ocean, its gaze barely penetrating a moment close to dawn in early autumn. I am suddenly overcome by a tension and a fatigue in the whole of my body, of waking from a dream of the world.



I never learned to swim,” I say, and my voice cracks.



What?” Lily leans her face into my cheek. Our pace is slow and the walk seems interminably long. I feel as if I could cry at any second. I’m not sure if I really can’t swim. I can’t remember if I ever learned or not, but something hurts me and those are the words for it.



I never learned to swim, its nothing. I just—let’s not stop. It’s not a big deal.”



She turns in to kiss me again, this time more forcefully. She has the lapels of my jacket in her hands and pushes her body towards mine. I can feel the hope in her eyes, which are closed. I can feel her expectations rising. She’s forgotten she has no idea who I am, and I remember. I’m certain at this that moment I’d rather be holding on to anything else. The sound of the Q pulling in to the downtown platform rips my thoughts away. I set her back on her feet and walk toward the turnstile.



Where are you going?” Gone is the nonchalance. She’s adamant in a way I didn’t anticipate. She stumbles forward and steadies herself on the ticket-taker. Something is wrong with her balance, I realize, that has nothing to do with the alcohol. But it doesn’t matter.



I’m going this way. I don’t think either of us need me to go that way. We’re both better off if I’m on this one.”



You’re not making any sense… What’s wrong? Tonight was so…” I can hear in her voice the sound of something slipping away, something frantic that can’t be undone. Her posture has become unhinged, and she’s listing back and forward. Lily falls over the metal spokes of the turnstile and onto the concrete on my side. She catches herself with the heels of both hands, sparing her chin, but fails to totally conceal the obtrusion of a hard, flesh-colored plastic mass where her right leg ought to be. A sudden gust of wind carries the beginning of her sobs and blows the sound inward to reverberate off the walls like some guttural language, as I put my hands under her arms to pull her upright. Hot tears are flooding her cheeks, tears that aren’t proportional to anything that, in an instant, could be clear. I understand that her tears have always been missing. But then the truth of it falls away from me, and it’s never near enough to grasp again, as if everything were behind an asteroid belt or a great reef. I leave her standing against the turnstile and as I walk down to the awaiting train, I can hear her or someone like her repeating the word pig over and over in the stairwell that has become an echo chamber.



Between Brighton Beach and Coney Island, the line moves out of the trench and onto an elevated track that has a view of the surrounding neighborhoods, whose inhabitants, come dawn, have either returned from their sleepwalking or awakened from the hypnosis that, by night, seems to take this city by the throat. The morning is dewy and overcast, and clouds heavy with seawater fill the sky. I don’t think I will ever see Lily again in any of our lifetimes.



Maybe it’s been so difficult to put a stop to all this because I can’t remember when it started. Is that what you want me to say, that I’ve wasted a year—it may as well have been ten—searching for someone I know I’ll never find? She was always so good at hiding, Ellie was—did I tell you that? She was like a child in that regard. She always had a way of fitting herself behind a bookshelf or in the folds of our comforter in just the right way that I would never know that she was still there. And that’s what it’s like now, except that I know she’s there and she doesn’t. Or I only know one thing and she knows everything. Or I know everything, but I keep forgetting the most important parts, and she couldn’t care less. Christ, it’s enough to make a man drunk! Where to now, Ellie? Coney Island? Is that where I lost you, where it all dissolved like a strip of film in an acid solution or a sea of ghosts? Is it that easy for me to forget the question? Or is it some new question? But the question never changes, only the answers.



The train station at Coney Island is built like a cathedral whose narthex is a shooting gallery. I pass down flights of green iron stairs with slats between them. I walk through a sort of cavernous passageway filled with grotesque mosaics; a minstrel clown, a thief and a dog. It’s still too early in the morning for the vendors to bring their carts around, and barely any customers move through here during the fall anyway. The mist is heavy over the beach as I move toward the boardwalk. A small pavilion striped in purple and white has been erected in the sand about 25 yards away, and a woman in possibly her early seventies is sitting in a folding chair, with an absent but contented expression, holding a sign that says “THE CHAMBER OF THE ASTRAL MIRROR: KNOW THE FUTURE AS ITS WRITTEN IN THE STARS. $7. NO REFUNDS.”



What’s inside the tent?” I ask when I reach her.



Oh well, what to say, it’s different for everyone I suppose!”



But what do you see when you go inside?” I’m almost pleading now. I notice that her face looks much older when she speaks, because her wrinkles stretch themselves tight at the strain with which she appears to constantly smile.



Oh well, what to say, what to say? I don’t go in much anymore, not me. Not much of a future left for me, but the Mirror—now it’s perfect for a young fellow such as yourself, I think! You see, the stars sit in the sky for billions of years—believe you me, I’ve been around the block quite a few times! But for them, our lives can be understood in the blink of an eye. When the light from our planet reaches them, they send it back in a superwave that moves so fast it catches things that we don’t know have already happened! Yessir, its no accident neither—how did you think I got the idea? I saw myself get the idea in the mirror itself! But just this mirror. It’s the one that catches the special kind of light you need. Yessir, and we take it out in the nighttime and then trap it in the chamber you see behind me. Just seven dollars! Step right in—no refunds.”



I give her three bills and I pull the flap of the tent aside. There is a fine scent of rotting seaweed inside, and propped against one of the pavilion’s poles I can see the Astral Mirror, a corroded antique looking glass with an ornate wooden frame whose white paint is chipped. Next to the mirror, four people are sitting at a picnic table in the shadows eating McDonalds hamburgers wrapped in wax paper and drinking orange juice from clear plastic cups. When they look up, I realize that the youth I saw on the platform on Seventh Ave. is among them. He’s sitting next to his younger sister, who wears her dark hair in pigtails. He doesn’t recognize me. The boy’s father, a round and balding man with a full, dark mustache, turns around and looks surprised, and then gestures to his wife, who’s similarly shaped and wears her hair in a bun. The woman looks at me.



Did my mother let you in? She’s very old, she forgets we don’t start for another hour with this. I’m sorry, we’re right in the middle of breakfast.” She whispers something to the father, who takes out his wallet and offers me seven dollars.



You’ll never get your money back from that one,” he chuckles. “She didn’t just make the policy, she is the policy.” I make a motion without words to refuse the money, and I walk back out the way I came. The old woman’s expression has changed. I can’t tell if she’s heard what her family has said, but her face is even more haggard now. She has a look as if she’s been thinking with great difficulty, as if she had discovered that it was her life through which the course of human history must proceed before there can be any rest. She looks at me, only now realizing I’ve returned, and forms her trembling mouth to the words.



What did you see?”



 



* * *



 



In the winter, the beaches and the boardwalks of Coney Island are deserted, and at dusk on this day, it would be no different except for the solitary gray form, leaning against the railing, of two people in an embrace. They stand bundled in coats and scarves, indifferent to the wind that cuts from off the surface of the water. The man and the woman never speak to one another, or if they do, their words are muffled or lost in the wind. It’s difficult to say when it begins to snow, but when the flakes fall, they collect in the man’s collar and in the long brown hair that falls from beneath the woman’s cap. The sun, almost setting, casts veins of ochre light from behind the elongated clouds. They do not turn away from one another, but in the wild of the near-night, neither man nor woman has ever seen the sky so close as it is for them at this moment on earth. A long time seems to pass, and they don’t so much as shiver, nor even seem to breathe. They remain, holding one another away, as if concealing each other from some hidden name, or a world into which they are not yet born.



 

Most sentences concerning *pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis—*like this one—are less occupied with the lung disease caused by inhalation of ultra-fine particles of silica volcanic dust than with the effort lungs must make to pronounce it. At 45 letters, it is indisputably the longest word in the English language—depending on whom you ask.



The English lexicon is a treasure trove of curios and perplexities. Some one million words strong by the standard of many dictionaries, most speakers know only ten to 60 thousand of them. Half of all speech and literature is comprised of just ten words and their derivatives: *the, be, to, of, a, in, that, have *and *I*, in order of frequency. The average number of unique words used daily by speakers is less than one thousand. What remains is an often confounding and occasionally laughable consortium of obscurities. Most of these entries almost never see the light of day. 



But a lucky few are glorified for their peculiarity: strange combinations of consonants and vowels, offbeat phonetic renderings, arcane definitions with obscene double meanings in modernity. And then there is the tongue-tied title of the English language’s longest word, a crown that has managed to bypass the desks of lexicographers and enter mainstream interest as the simultaneous epitome of the absurd and wondrous nature of the second-most spoken language in the world. But searching for the winning word unlocks the Pandora’s box of lexicography and a debate at the core of language itself: what constitutes a word? Determining the longest word becomes a trek through linguistic philosophy that zigzags from Plato to the editorial board of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). There is no one-word answer. 



But* pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoco-niosis *is as good of a word as any with which to begin. The entry was born February 3, 1935 in New York at the annual meeting of the National Puzzlers’ League, an organization devoted to word play and word games. Self-described as “The National Intellectual Pastime of America,” the League, founded in 1883, predates crossword puzzles and does not recognize such mainstream wordplay as an important puzzling experience. It does, however, recognize *pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis*, which its president Everett M. Smith invented for the sole purpose of laying claim to the longest word. It was unveiled at the 1935 gathering and the members present ratified its creation. The next day *The* *New York Herald Tribune* published an article declaring that *electrophotomicrographically* had been triumphed over. By 1939 the name for the lung disease could be found in a Merriam-Webster dictionary. 



The word remains the longest in a dictionary, and on this merit it is often granted the title of longest word. But this gives rise to another problem: which dictionary is definitive? The OED is less kind to *pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis*, branding it as “an artificial long word said to mean a lung disease caused by inhaling very fine ash and sand dust,” without including it in print editions. At 29 letters, the longest entry lurking in the OED is *floccinaucinihilipilification*, “the estimation of something as worthless.” If that seems to be a convenient description for an exceedingly clunky word, the definition is no coincidence. Frustrated Latin students at Eton College, tired of having to learn seemingly endless lists of word stems with nearly identical meanings, strung together four stems—*floccus*, a wisp; *naucum*, a trifle; *nihil*, nothing; *pilus*, insignificance—to create a word that begrudgingly defines itself. That was in 1714. 



But the coinage of purposefully long words can be traced back to 390 BCE, when the Greek comic playwright Aristophanes introduced the 171-letter *Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphioparaomelitokatakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon*, a meal—and word—comprised of seventeen different Greek delicacies. It is a word that even Google does not care to handle, advising that the search term “is too long a word. Try using a shorter word.” Writers have devoted ink to cumbersome length ever since. James Joyce offers *Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbr-onntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk*, a 101-letter word on the first page of *Finnegan’s Wake* that is often defined as “the symbolic thunderclap caused by the fall of Adam and Eve.” Even Shakespeare chimed in with a 27-letter contestant in “Love’s Labour’s Lost”: 



 



“O, they have lived long on the alms-basket of words.



I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word;



for thou art not long by the head as



honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier



swallowed than a flap-dragon.”



 



The literary title goes to Nigel Tomm, a neo-Dadaist of sorts who in 2008 self-published a 3,609,750-letter word spanning 812 pages in “The* *Blah Story, Volume 19” which he defines as the “current day or date between the real and imagined today.” The word contains within it all the aforementioned longest-word contenders. If Tomm’s first word is accepted, then the second-longest word can be found in “The Blah Story, Volume 10” at 2,403,109 letters. That word means “something like a girl or a bitch.” Large amounts of both words are comprised of the repeated use of *blah*.



Tomm’s mockery of the longest-word debate illuminates the problem faced by lexicographers who differentiate between authenticity and artificiality. The phrase “nonsense word” appears to be inherently hypocritical; a nonsense word must still be a word. Any utterance is then justifiably acceptable. What makes Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock any less legitimate than the Loch Ness Monster? 



Several things, according to the OED. An official word should have permanent and measurable social significance in terms of both meaning and popularity. To the OED, the slang word of the week is not a word, but the slang word of the decade very much is. There is no timetable for existence or usage required to slip inside the OED’s hallowed covers. Some words build momentum slowly over many years. Others gain the necessary traction in months. The OED oversees such progress with its Oxford English Corpus, a growing electronic collection of over two billion words that contains “sentences or short extracts drawn from a huge variety of writing, from song lyrics and popular fiction to scientific journals,” according to the OED. Emerging words can be tracked for ubiquity and standardization with the Corpus, giving lexicographers a measuring stick for which words should be stamped with an official seal of approval. Words that fail to make the cut are entered into a word vault, a filing system of rejected words containing entries stretching back to the time J.R.R. Tolkien was an editor of the OED. 



The OED leaves the unofficial words for the linguistic philosophers to trouble over. Plato believed in a degree of naturalness to phonemes, which are the smallest units of sound. Disputing complete conventionalism, he argued that the sounds in a word like *love* describe the feeling of love for an inherent natural reason, and not “the neck of a giraffe” or “Chapter Eleven bankruptcy” or an infinite number of other possible things. While many popular sources still echo this belief in inherent meaning, no linguist would support it today—even Plato eventually came around to the idea that social conventions influenced the creation of words and their attached meanings. One of the most important features of a language system is that its signs are arbitrary. If the legitimacy of various words were not already in question, Tomm might have never found reason to construct his anti-art behemoth.  If *blah* were not socially viewed as a construct of apathy, it might have never become a dominating set of phonemes in his “longest word.” 



Another aspect of the debate circles around morphemes--the smallest components of a word with semantic meaning. *Unreadable*, for example, has three morphemes: the stem *read* and the affixes *un* and *able*. Combined together, they form a word with practical social meaning. *Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis* is comprised of far more than three morphemes, but it is still created with the same fundamental building blocks. The only qualification the word lacks is the dignified stamp of authenticity. It was created for the deliberate purpose of being the longest word. But is one purpose any more worthy than another? All words are formed for some purpose; to discriminate against artificial words suggests that the creator of a word must be selfless. Words must be formed, then, for the sole purpose of describing a concept or entity, and have no intentional auxiliary ramifications. This divide of structure and function in language taps into an ongoing debate among linguists. Why do we have language? How did it begin and how does it evolve? How does human planning and conscious decision shape this evolution? And when crowning the longest word, should we care? What happens when a scholarly discovery or invention produces a new word that is remarkably long? Should the word’s inventor undergo a lie detector test to ensure there were no ulterior motives? Incidentally, lie detector tests have been proven to be accurate only when subjects use “real” words. Would the pre-baptized word need to be banned, or does its creator’s belief in its realness give it all the validity it needs?



One simple measure to gauge authenticity is to analyze the contexts in which social publications utilize such words, pitting actual usage against attempted codification. Many “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” words (which, at 34 letters, is defined in *Mary Poppins* as “something to say when you have nothing to say”) are discussed more often in reference to length than meaning, indicating artificiality. Of course, even authentic words will at times be written about in the context of unwieldy length due to popular intrigue. The National Puzzler’s League might argue that simply more people are interested in big words than obscure lung diseases. But for some words, like *Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis*, the imbalance is overwhelming. Tomm’s monsters have never appeared outside of their original publications. A blissfully self-aware entry at 35 letters is *hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia*, “the fear of extremely long words.” *Floccinaucinihilipilification*, though deliberately manufactured, has come nearest to authentic use, achieving a life beyond tongue-in-cheek discussions of its size.



Other causes, however, have also been found for dismissal. One potential contender is the 189,819-letter chemical name for titin, the largest known protein with an empirical formula of C132983H211861N36149O40883S693. Lexicographers disqualify the names for chemical compounds as verbal formulae that relate physical chemical compositions and are thus not actual English words. But verbal formulae still describe entities; they are built of phonemes. A chair can be broken down into trillions of molecules that can each be broken down into verbal formulae. If the chair is nothing more than the proper combination of these trillions of non-words, what qualifies *chair* as a word? The line might at times be drawn blurry, but for the lexicographer, it must still be drawn. 



One place that has fallen on the wrong side of that line is *Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu*, New Zealand, an otherwise inconspicuous hill that stands a mere 1,001 feet high.  Its name, which roughly means “The summit where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, the climber of mountains, the land-swallower who travelled about, played his nose flute to his loved one,” is the longest of any location in an English-speaking country at 85 letters. It is usually thrown out of contention for either being a proper noun or of questionable authenticity as a place name.



So what word remains standing amongst the linguistic carnage? Amazingly, the one that every eight-year-old can recite: *antidisestablishmentarianism*, “the political opposition to the disestablishment of the Church of England in 19th-century Britain.” At 28 letters, it remains the longest non-technical, authentic and undisputed entry that can be found in almost all major dictionaries and is popularly known as the English language’s longest word. Unless, that is, one could be a *pseudoantidisestablishmentarianist*. But that matter will be left to politics. Lexicographers deserve a chance to catch their breaths.