In Rob's defense it's his genetics. They're both married and not to each other and sometimes it looks like he's attracted to her, but he's not dumb enough for such an obvious cheating partner. Heck, I think she's cute, but I'm not going to tell her that. 😜. He's a blusher. Very Celtic trait, I believe. I blush easily too, but I'm a ginger with gingervitus, I've got no soul.
Way back in the last century (somewhere around 1988 or 1989) I coined a word which is respectable in length: monolithodiornithocide. It is the act of killing two birds with one stone.
Man, I LOVED hearing the story of how antidisestablishmentarianism was popularized as a word! Thank you for that! The longest word I’ve memorized is one I learned from a song: “Let’s go canoeing on Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg.” Which is a place name from Algonquian - otherwise known as Lake Webster in Massachusetts. I often find myself singing this song while cooking. I snorted at “skilometers”
I was hoping for Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu which I memorised as a boy with a copy of the Guinness World Records book. Interestingly I see they have slightly changed the translation since I learned it, he is no loger a 'circumnavigator of lands' but a 'climber of mountains... who travelled about' - sounds a bit tame somehow.
Whenever English friends and classmates ask me about ridiculous German compound words, I tend to point out that English and German aren't too different in how they build compounds. In fact, you can build a lot of exactly the same ones in both languages. The only difference is that Engish puts some spaces in there if you write them down but the mechanics are quite the same. Makes it easier to fathom for a lot of peope. Also fun fact: Because it's been drilled into my head that English doesn't glue words together, I frequently rip words apart that are actually spelled without a space. Like I literally had to look up just now if "classmate" is one word or two and I keep battling with "orange juice" or "wheelchair" in the same vein. It's quite arbitrary sometimes, whereas German's just like: ah smash 'em all together.
New Zealand has a place name Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu It translates to English as: “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”.
Tamatea got around. He started out in Otamatea in Northland and was exiled with his son Kahungunu and journeyed down the East Coast. Kahungunu settled in Hawkes Bay and Tamatea continued on south.
Yeah, I was surprised they didn't mention that one, especially as it was in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest word in the world, and it's fairly well known from its use as a backing-vocal chant in Quantum Leap's 1976 single 'Lone Ranger'.
@@RabidJohn Quantum Jump - and featured regularly on The Kenny Everett Show - with what would now be seen as 'problematic' animation 😮 (so if you look it up don't say you weren't warned)
Have a look at the full name for Bangkok. It has 168 letters. It's kinda similar to Taumata - "City of angels, great city of immortals, magnificent city of the nine gems..." etc. A lot of Thai people know it, because it was used as the lyrics to a pop song. Quite nice that Bangkok means pretty much the same thing as Los Angeles. Kinda.
I’m astonished at how charming Rob is. I truly enjoy his presentations and I think he and Jess are excellent partners. I truly enjoy watching the two of them geek out together, even more than I enjoy watching the presentations and learning the material. The two of them being so happy sharing their passion is really uplifting. I thank them both 🫡
All those that came before you established this movement are therefore precounterantidisestablishmentarianists. And those who come after you are postcounterantidisestablishmentarianists.
I was in elementary school in the 60s and the word antidisestablishmentarianism suddenly became a hot trend. None of us knew why, so thank you for explaining it to me all these years later. But it also came in handy for our teachers to use for teaching root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Once you understand that, it's easy to pull apart almost any word to comprehend its meaning.
The "smiles" joke crossed my mind early in the podcast but I thought I can't possibly go there in the comments. Thanks Rob for going there; it amused the child in me very much!
Instead of saying it's long because it has a mile between the first and last letter you could impress even more by saying from the first letter it goes on for miles.
As a German I'd like to point out that it's not strictly agglutination what German does. It's better described by the term "fusional language". However, both terms describe additions to words for grammatical purposes. What we do in German by connecting multiple words to create a new noun is called a "Kompositum", or "alphabetical procession" if you go with Marc Twain😉. And this is how we create nouns that fill pages, if we want to.
Your friendly neighbour language Dutch does it like that too. According to Van Dale, the most prestigious Dutch dictionary, the longest Dutch word in common use is _meervoudigepersoonlijkheidsstoornis_ (multiple personality disorder).
The annoying/fun thing about German compound words is that, like in English, the most important part comes at the end of the word, but we keep going: Mülltonne is a trash can. Mülltonnendeckel is the lid of the trash can. Mülltonnendeckelersatzteil is a spare part for the lid of a trash can, and Mülltonnendeckelersatzteilverkäufer is the person who sells spare parts for the lid if a trash can...
And indeed, you could argue that lots of things _written_ with a space (or hyphen) in English is a "compound word" just the same, and it's sort of a matter of _spelling conventions_ rather than spoken grammar so to speak
@@metallsnubben You have a point there where spelling is concerned. But essentially English and German apply different mechanisms to create expressions: Bundesverfassungsgericht literally is federation constitution court. I would suggest that English would use an adjectival phrase instead: federal constitutional court, or probably just Supreme Court...
My old boss was a target shooting enthusiast. Several times he took groups of the staff to the gun club he belonged to and did an informal gun-safety course. On at least one occasion he tailored it specifically to the women in the department, and wanted a name for the event, something like "Girls and Guns". I suggested "Pistols and Pulchritude", which he loved once I explained what "pulchritude" was!
@@renerpho yeah, it's why you have 'a' 'à' 'ou' 'où' and 'la' 'là' in French. Especially la being a definite article. If you read 'c'est la' without 'là' would be super vague and ambiguous.
What a marvellous, multitudinous melange of multisyllabic monstrosities! Magnificently manufactured and meticulously elucidated. (even if my alliteration fell down there at the end)
@@frankmerrill2366 Sure, but I was after something along the lines of explained, not just told and I couldn't think of an alliteration, so I went with the closest to an alliteration my mind could throw up at the moment.
In computer science, the discipline of internationalization is often abbreviated “i18n” with the 18 replacing the count of the intervening letters. "l10n" being the other for "localization".
"Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis Even though the sound of it Is something quite atrocious If you say it long enough you will get halitosis Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis" was a song I sang to myself about a half century ago. No one else thought it was funny
I never comment on RUclips but I just had to say that while listening to the latter half of this I became engrossed in watching some ants crawling around on the floor and so the mention of the term "myrmecophilous" was incredibly appropriate. Great work as always Rob and Jess!
In cryptography, a nonce is an arbitrary number that can be used just once in a cryptographic communication. It is often a random or pseudo-random number. 22:44
I must admit I do find somewhat more than a pinch of pleasure in reading thence attempting to recite both Brennan’s Prose-verse-poster-algebraic-symbolico-riddle Musicopoematographoscope & his Pocket Musicopoematographoscope….
I look forward to each of these videos; you two play off each other beautifully. I’m fond of the German word Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung (Motor vehicle liability insurance)and the stunningly specific Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän (captain of a Danube steamship company ship).
Welcome to the Finnish language. 😂 Compound words galore, but it's also a heavily synthetic language. One of my favourite compund words is matalalattiaraitiovaunu (not especially long, but fun sounding). That's a tram with a lowered floor, except the word for tram in it's self is already a compound word. So it's low_floor_rail_waggon. Then we can have a word almost like a whole sentence such as "minullakinkohan" "I have also (I wonder)?" or "kissoistammeko" "from our cats?". These can easily be made very long, but extreme tonguetwisters are usually not used for the sake of keeping things a bit easier on everybody. Finnish is super difficult to learn at the start, but luckily it's quite logical and everything reads exactly as it's written (looking at you ENGLISH with a bombastic side eye!) So after the innitial hurdle it gets easier. Regardless of complex rules it's also quite flexible.
Hearing Rob day "innit?" brought to mind a possible episode topic: words that came about because of being shortened while speaking. Y'all already did "goodbye", but there's loads more
Humongoamorphus - A word describing the distance between raised hands, that fishermen use to depict the fish that got away, which changes at each retelling.
When Jacob Rees Mogg was an MP I recall him being referred to as the Honourable Member for the 18th century. I loved his dry wit and his sense of history and tradition.
As always I love the video. I was wondering if you had ever thought of doing one on proper nouns which have become adjectives. The 2 which most readily come to mind for me are Billingsgate and Quisling
Japanese being a pro drop, agglutinative language, it's possible for one or two words to express what would be a full sentence in English. It's hard to explain why I love it so much without explain all the linguistic building blocks of Japanese syntax. もう食べすぎちゃった (mou tabesugichatta) translates as 'I have regretfully/unfortunately already eaten too much'
Many superlong words in English happen to be in the medical field. If one desires to know those words, try that field. A suggestion for an upcoming episode would be phrases that revolve around animals, such as busy as a bee or a dog's life. There are many such phrases, most that don't have any obvious animal but are still derived from such.
P.S. what about the full name of Bangkok? (There's a famous rock song by a Thai band that repeats it over and over which I sometimes adds to my Llanfair learns as it way longer.
Are some numbers larger infinities than others (as can be true in math), when in word forms? How about numbers like e or pi, if spelled out in words? Can they be both shortest and longest "words"?
Back in the 1970s while i was in 7th grade Antidisestablishmentarianism was a bonus spelling word my english teacher gave us one time. The definition he provided was extremely lazy and simplistic, and I didn’t learn the actual meaning until I was much older; but i always remembered the word itself, afterward. And now, thanks to you, I’ve learned the wonderful reason for it’s popularity (although to date, I’ve yet to meet another person who knows of it if I bring it up)
@@WordsUnravelled I am a retired teacher / Word Nerd. I just received the books and read parts of them before gifting. They are both so well done! Tyty
Finnish can verb a noun and noun a verb. So stringing these operations one after another will get you as long word in Finnish as you want. Meaning of the word can be lost on the way, but who cares when the idea is count the letters of a word. I rather think Finnish as the wonderfull language that can have such words as "pääjääjäjäjäärä", which to my knowledge is the longest consecutive dots on letters as there can be in one word. The meaning of that compund word ravels from the middle. "Jäädä" means to stay, "jääjä" is one who stays, "pääjääjä" is from a group of those who stay the head one and if that "pääjääjä" is obnoxious eg. a "-jäärä" about it then they are "pääjääjäjäärä".
Having been teaching K-12 students to pronounce the full name of LlanfairPG (not going to write it all out here) through a song for decades now now I get to add this little tidbit to my lessons! YAY!
What a wonderful episode. May I join the esteemed Mr. Edmund Blackadder in offering you my most enthusaiastic contrafibularities. Lest I become anaspeptic, phrasmotic, even compunctuous, I shall endeavour to cause you no pericombobulations, and leave interfrastically.
I love you guys so much ❤ such a great show. Interesting and intellectual, but also so easy to listen to and take in. You guys are great. Never stop making these!
My favourite long German word is Zylinderkopfdichtungsinstandsetzungsarbeiten, which in the context of automobile repair, means "cylinder head gasket installation work"
So much fun! Have you yet done an episode on words that are hard to spell? I'm a pretty good speller, but there are some words that always baffle me. Like the "d" word for explosively defecating -- how many r's? how many h's?
My late father would have loved this channel. His favourite made-up word was preanteipenultimate - i.e. the last but four in a series of items. Note: "Made-up" definitely requires a hyphen.
Sphygmomanometer is a very-long (not quite extremely-long) word that is truly a mouthful. Is deinstitutionalization the longest English word that is in somewhat-common usage?
Oh my goodness, My husband and a friend of his in High school looked up a bunch of long words to impress people and have a laugh, used this word "omphaloskepsis". He asked me if I knew the word when we were dating and I've heard him use this word through the years. He always has to remind me what it means. He wants to know if you know the word 'oral diadochokinesis. It's a word he learned in college majoring in Speech & Hearing. What fun this episode is.
38:22 I mis-heard “creativity” as “creazy mind” (/kri'eizi maind/), and just wanted to say I think “creazy” is a rather nice portmanteau of “creative” and “crazy”.
I had some friends who put out a poll on facebook the night before their wedding over how to merge their names, hyphenating in either direction or which portmanteau was preferred and everyone pointed out that one version sounded like a fantasy dragon name, so they chose that option.
There used to be a British TV quiz called Catchword. It had a round where three consonants came up and contestants had to say the longest word starting with the first, with the other two in there somewhere, not necessarily consecutively, in the same order. You'll be unsurprised to hear that pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovocanoconiosis and floccinaucinihilipilification came up quite regularly.
A very fun post. And it soooo brings to mind a long word (completely made up of course) in the 1960's show, My Favorite Martian: "Supermicrodistilatingliquichemicosis" -- I'm sure you can guess from which other made-up-word they got their inspiration. lol! Anyway, I only discovered your channel recently and have been loving it! 🙂
Strictly, das Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz is the law (Gesetz) concerning the transfer (Übertragung) of responsibility (Aufgabe) for the supervision (Überwachung) of the labeling (Etikettierung) of beef (Rindfleisch).
It also only held the record for four years (1999-2003), when it was surpassed by the Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung.
I must thank you for giving me a word to cover my morning's activities before I sat down to watch your show. I had been engaging in antimyrmecophiloustic maneuvers about the house and took a break to ask ;is supercalifragilisticexpealidocious within the normal lexicography or is ti merely a Disneyism? Thanks again for your marvelous lipitongueimouthibrain twisters. R. Webb
I learned floccinaucinihilipilification at school in the 1960s from our Latin master but he pronounced the first 4 syllables as "flocky nowky" and nihili with short "i"s, the same as in the "pili" part of the word
I forgot about defenestration,(14), for a long time and only recently heard it again. What a wonderful way of saying I threw it out of the window!! :-) E.g. A rock star was charged with defenestrating a television from a hotel!
I'm pretty sure that Dichlorfluoromethane is also used as a refrigerant gas. ...at least it used to be. as a florocarbon it's been replaced by another refrigerant called R-134a that's less deleterious to the atmosphere if accidentally released. (we referred to the previous gas as R-12, you may have heard of it by that name)
I sometimes get reminded of speaking an agglutinative language, when I casually happen to write message to friend with a word so long it doesn't fit to my phone's screen and gets forcibly cut in middle. Bummer it's usually not because of agglutination but some kind of compound like the good old "lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas", which is something like "aeroplane jet turbine motor assistant mechanic non-commissioned officer-in-training" in Finnish, and apparently in proper use as a rank and not just made up. Not sure though, it's just what I've heard!
I would like to hear you and Jess talk about the "regulation" of language. For example L'acadamie francaise regulates the words "Le Weekend" which by law must be replaced on publication with "la fin de semaine". How has this constrained the development of French for example.
It would interest me as well. L'Académie Française is very reticent to accept neologisms and words coming directly from english into the "correct" French language. This means that there is one main organism that dictates what words the students in several countries can use in texts. I've never heard of such a control on language happening in English. I'm often astounded by the number of neologisms that are accepted in English dictionaries. Really curious about the whole process of "accepting" new words.
@@tomrio9152 Yes, there is no "French Academy" equivalent for English, and the difference goes to the heart of the Anglophone culture. Oxford used to require a defense of an unfamiliar word in scholarly papers by a citation of an authoritative precedent, but nothing like an attempt to enforce such a standard generally has happened or has been thinkable (aside from the international "political correctness" phenomenon). The French authorities are afraid, with reason, of Europe gradually merging linguistically into the Anglosphere. This is less a concern for the Anglosphere both because none of the external influences on English are as powerful as the influences of English on others, and because if we were going to start preventing foreign influences from infecting English, we are starting a few centuries too late. English thrives on absorbing foreign words and constructions, and it's word order syntax facilitates it.
@@tomrio9152Add to that the issue of the degree to which francophone countries outside France adhere to l'Académie's prescribed "official" neologisms (or not)... FWIW, I was in uni at the time l'Académie revamped pretty much the entire engineering and computer science lexicon...
@@AJansenNL Thai and Lao have some really long words and names. The longest capitol name in the world is Bangkok in Thai "Krung Thep Maha Nakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahintharayutthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Phiman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam Prasit". But it only has a few longer words in it "กรุงเทพมหานคร อมรรัตนโกสินทร์ มหินทรายุธยามหาดิลก ภพนพรัตน์ ราชธานีบุรีรมย์ อุดมราชนิเวศน์ มหาสถาน อมรพิมาน อวตารสถิต สักกะทัตติยะ วิษณุกรรมประสิทธิ์".
I was looking for this. And don't forget prefixes, which even English has. Agglutinating languages are languages which combine many morphemes into few words.
Big fan of this channel. Great job, Rob and Jess. Is this how we request subjects for videos? Would it be interesting to talk about the etymology of words that have several meanings such as STRIKE. Strike to hit, strike to miss in baseball, strike to take down a set in theater, and strike to organize the workers to not work in order to pressure the management of a business (like Beoing is doing now). Did all these uses come from the same origin? This might a silly or boring subject :P Anyway, thanks for the great and entertaining videos!
Great episode as always. I do have a question though. What is a word? In English we tend to think of a word as a series of letters between spaces and/or punctuation marks or as component parts of a sentence. Does this definition also apply to the exceptionally long German or Greek 'words' or are they simply sentences/phrases in and of themselves (just without spaces) rather than components of sentences?
I love this channel! I have always taken a dictionary into the bathroom to keep from being bored! Short attention span! My favorite things to look up are people's names! What is the name's meaning, its origin and other similar names!
A video I thought of that you guys could do is one where given words have a ridiculous number of meanings like "set" and "rose". Another one would be all the manifold meanings prepositional verbs can have like "toss up", "make up", et al.
You mentioned Finnish, so here is a Finnish word nerd classic: epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydelllänsäkäänköpähän -- my translation: "presumably not even with his/her inability to unsystematize, I wonder?"
Many ancient languages didn't use punctuation between words. So part of being literate meant being able to break up the words but where one "word" ended and the other began didn't really have a physical distinction and so a what is a word could be up to interpretation.
Would you consider doing an episode on negatives and negation? There are so many prefixes that can be used to negate a word in English, just a few examples, anti, de, in, non, un, among many others. Sometimes a word will have two negatives, which are not quite interchangeable, which could be perhaps described as a ''soft negative'' and a ''hard negative''.
Or, a word will have two different negatives, to use the antonym of the root word in two different senses. The one that immediately comes to mind are uninterested and disinterested, which definitely do not mean the same thing. And there are "soft" and "hard" positives: I SHALL is "harder" than I WILL.
1) hypothesis: the fact that English has emerged in societies which included writing and matured parallel to the printing press disincentivizes the formation of compound words (potentially due to the differences between visual and aural processing) and also makes composing in metered, rhyming verse difficult. In ancient societies, where information and literature was solely or primarily preserved and distributed through memorized and recited/chanted/sung metered rhyming verse, it was necessary to be able to smoosh (technical term) words into compounds. Greek is great at this. Latin is better at this than at being a practical language for daily conversation, and Sanskrit takes home the gold as a language that compounds words from compound words and drops or combines sounds, so that a word or phrase can have multiple meanings and multiple layers of interpretation, depending on how many layers of etymological evolution one digs into. 2) my favorite German compound is not super long, but is delightfully accurate: windschutzscheibe. "Wind protection slice. " aka windshield.
Depivotification is a term I’ve coined that describes the movement to rid the world of the overuse of the corporate buzz words, especially the dreaded ‘pivot’.
Ref "pulchritude", Francis Galton was totally sold on the idea of quantification. This extended to an index of feminine pulchritude. His method involved overlaying photographs of faces to create an average physiognomy as a baseline. Galton is credited with the invention of statistical regression and the logNormal distribution as well as being a pioneer of the eugenics movement.
I gave up reading through that greek word too... But what is interesting is the way Jess read out the bits vs how I would have, and that pertains to what Rob was saying about understanding the components of a composite word like that. Jess paused at random (and really uncomfortable to me) mid-word places because for her it's just a letter train rather than a word train.
You are both very eloquent, charming and sweet. Your interest in languages inspire me so much, that when you were near the end, after a quite lengthy and very entertaining as well as informative, inspiring and downright adventurous forty minutes, Rob said that it was near the ending, I actually wanted more! And I am a no-BS-guy, my motto (French? "mot"? Italian: motto?) is get to the point, and don't ever even say: "Without further ado, let's get tothe point!" My enthusiasm could be due to my personal interest in etymology, as well as all the other sciences about human made things (and also natural sciences of course, but that's is "The Other Side" "wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more say no more (M. Python) ;-) ;-) But it is definitely mainly because of your brilliance both of you, as your differences compliment each other. It is like music in some ways. A symphony. There must be a word for not playing music together, but doing what you do together. Bonafidelo-colabora-syngeno-evolutio-creationism? Nah. And to camera two: What's up with "yea no yea"? When did it start, and is it finally going away like covid? Or merely replaced with Ozzy Man's "Yes... nah yea!"? Moron this in Daffuture! Or maybe not. "Language is a virus" sang Laurie Anderson. If so, I can never get sick of it, until I think the worst, and then believe it myself. Language is for better and for words....
My favourite word is sesquipedalian, and I like to use it in this little motto I devised several years ago: "Why use 3 short words, when a quatrain of sesquipedalian dialogue will suffice?" I must get one of your 'Word Nerd' mugs! Also, I now live not far from Llanfair PG (as it's known locally), but learnt how to pronounce it when I was 14 and living in Somerset.
Can you make a video about words being used only as part of expressions? For example “sinker” in “hook, line and sinker”, or “ulterior” in “ulterior motive”
Nonce can also mean "for the time being". I've encountered it quite a bit in that sense in English literature from a hundred years ago. The switch to its current, more sinister usage must be fairly recent. Another word that has changed in meaning dramatically over the past century is diddling - Edgar Allan Poe wrote an entire story entitled "Diddling considered as one of the exact sciences", where in this context the word means a confidence game. Don't try to use the word today in that sense today though, nobody will get it, and it may get you in a lot of trouble!
Nobody working in the field actually refers to a protein by listing each individual amino acid in order in word form! We use the sequence, but as data, not the name. The closest to using such a name is when referring to relatively short peptides, i.e., an oligopeptide.
I like words that can compound in Scrabble. Line to masculine to hypermasculine is one(or three) I've used myself. It's possibly hyphenated but unless your opponent is sure, they won't challenge you
These aren’t long word, just words I’m curious about. Beforehand & afterward and other similar words; collective nouns, mass nouns, nouns that are the same when singular or plural. Love the channel, so interesting and fun.
It seems Rob blushes at least once during most every episode. Nicely done, Jess!
That impression would be very much diminished if Rob were using a warm, soft lighting like Jess is rather than the harsh white he tends to use :D
Is there a word for that?
remember: an erection is technically blushing.
until we meet again!
In Rob's defense it's his genetics. They're both married and not to each other and sometimes it looks like he's attracted to her, but he's not dumb enough for such an obvious cheating partner. Heck, I think she's cute, but I'm not going to tell her that. 😜. He's a blusher. Very Celtic trait, I believe. I blush easily too, but I'm a ginger with gingervitus, I've got no soul.
Great episode!
Way back in the last century (somewhere around 1988 or 1989) I coined a word which is respectable in length: monolithodiornithocide. It is the act of killing two birds with one stone.
I'm having this.
R
@@WordsUnravelled Thank you! 😄
Please, do show...😎
Man, I LOVED hearing the story of how antidisestablishmentarianism was popularized as a word! Thank you for that!
The longest word I’ve memorized is one I learned from a song: “Let’s go canoeing on Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg.” Which is a place name from Algonquian - otherwise known as Lake Webster in Massachusetts.
I often find myself singing this song while cooking.
I snorted at “skilometers”
That lake is only a couple of hours from me! I'll have to take my kayak up there! - Jess
I was hoping for Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu which I memorised as a boy with a copy of the Guinness World Records book. Interestingly I see they have slightly changed the translation since I learned it, he is no loger a 'circumnavigator of lands' but a 'climber of mountains... who travelled about' - sounds a bit tame somehow.
If we were measuring nerdiness, that skillometer would be giving results off the charts!
Whenever English friends and classmates ask me about ridiculous German compound words, I tend to point out that English and German aren't too different in how they build compounds. In fact, you can build a lot of exactly the same ones in both languages. The only difference is that Engish puts some spaces in there if you write them down but the mechanics are quite the same. Makes it easier to fathom for a lot of peope.
Also fun fact: Because it's been drilled into my head that English doesn't glue words together, I frequently rip words apart that are actually spelled without a space. Like I literally had to look up just now if "classmate" is one word or two and I keep battling with "orange juice" or "wheelchair" in the same vein. It's quite arbitrary sometimes, whereas German's just like: ah smash 'em all together.
I hate it when MS Word insists that I should always combine words like “sometimes”. There are some times when you don’t mean ‘sometimes’.
In Norwegian: One ting - one word. Splitting up is not allowed ( sadly everyone don’t know)
I'm an English speaker and I have the same problem.
Dutch does the same thing as German: just glue everything together.
I was so relieved! I kept waiting to hear the name of the Welsh town, and you got it in there.
New Zealand has a place name
Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu
It translates to English as: “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”.
Tamatea got around. He started out in Otamatea in Northland and was exiled with his son Kahungunu and journeyed down the East Coast. Kahungunu settled in Hawkes Bay and Tamatea continued on south.
@@tomobedlam297 that explains the knees then. I've always been curious about why his knees where so important
Yeah, I was surprised they didn't mention that one, especially as it was in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest word in the world, and it's fairly well known from its use as a backing-vocal chant in Quantum Leap's 1976 single 'Lone Ranger'.
@@RabidJohn Quantum Jump - and featured regularly on The Kenny Everett Show - with what would now be seen as 'problematic' animation 😮 (so if you look it up don't say you weren't warned)
Have a look at the full name for Bangkok. It has 168 letters.
It's kinda similar to Taumata - "City of angels, great city of immortals, magnificent city of the nine gems..." etc.
A lot of Thai people know it, because it was used as the lyrics to a pop song.
Quite nice that Bangkok means pretty much the same thing as Los Angeles. Kinda.
I’m astonished at how charming Rob is. I truly enjoy his presentations and I think he and Jess are excellent partners. I truly enjoy watching the two of them geek out together, even more than I enjoy watching the presentations and learning the material. The two of them being so happy sharing their passion is really uplifting. I thank them both 🫡
My favourite use of a hyphen is in 'non-hyphenated'. I love these videos, hugely fascinating every time.
😂😂😂
I came to watch the podcast becasue Rob's videos often fascinate me, but I really like the dynamic between you guys and I love the podcast already.
I don’t support antidisestablishmentarianism. So I am a counterantidisestablishmentarianist.
Oddly, so am I. Now we can make the plural!
All those that came before you established this movement are therefore precounterantidisestablishmentarianists. And those who come after you are postcounterantidisestablishmentarianists.
@rich1051414 the prefix yester like yesterday or yesteryear kinda means previous so we could call them yestercounterantidisestablismentarians
And I used to be like you, but now I am decounterantidisestablishmentarianist
that's fighting talk round our way
I was in elementary school in the 60s and the word antidisestablishmentarianism suddenly became a hot trend. None of us knew why, so thank you for explaining it to me all these years later.
But it also came in handy for our teachers to use for teaching root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Once you understand that, it's easy to pull apart almost any word to comprehend its meaning.
same here! i was thinking of the contests to see who could spell it fast,early 60's.
Won a 3rd grade spelling bee off of that word, back in ye olden times 😊
The "smiles" joke crossed my mind early in the podcast but I thought I can't possibly go there in the comments. Thanks Rob for going there; it amused the child in me very much!
Instead of saying it's long because it has a mile between the first and last letter you could impress even more by saying from the first letter it goes on for miles.
As a German I'd like to point out that it's not strictly agglutination what German does. It's better described by the term "fusional language". However, both terms describe additions to words for grammatical purposes.
What we do in German by connecting multiple words to create a new noun is called a "Kompositum", or "alphabetical procession" if you go with Marc Twain😉. And this is how we create nouns that fill pages, if we want to.
Your friendly neighbour language Dutch does it like that too. According to Van Dale, the most prestigious Dutch dictionary, the longest Dutch word in common use is _meervoudigepersoonlijkheidsstoornis_ (multiple personality disorder).
The annoying/fun thing about German compound words is that, like in English, the most important part comes at the end of the word, but we keep going: Mülltonne is a trash can. Mülltonnendeckel is the lid of the trash can. Mülltonnendeckelersatzteil is a spare part for the lid of a trash can, and Mülltonnendeckelersatzteilverkäufer is the person who sells spare parts for the lid if a trash can...
@@janekalbinsky There's a Dutch joke, in which the prize for winning a game is "a Mercedes-Benz-autobandventieldopje".
And indeed, you could argue that lots of things _written_ with a space (or hyphen) in English is a "compound word" just the same, and it's sort of a matter of _spelling conventions_ rather than spoken grammar so to speak
@@metallsnubben You have a point there where spelling is concerned. But essentially English and German apply different mechanisms to create expressions: Bundesverfassungsgericht literally is federation constitution court. I would suggest that English would use an adjectival phrase instead: federal constitutional court, or probably just Supreme Court...
Jess’s head movement while listening is mesmerizing to me. To me, it adds to her beauty, and I could watch her all day.
My old boss was a target shooting enthusiast. Several times he took groups of the staff to the gun club he belonged to and did an informal gun-safety course. On at least one occasion he tailored it specifically to the women in the department, and wanted a name for the event, something like "Girls and Guns". I suggested "Pistols and Pulchritude", which he loved once I explained what "pulchritude" was!
Yeah, one of those words which has a harsh sound so contrary to its actual meaning. Pulchritude, meet chuffed.
Hyphens save sport careers. "Star NFL player" re-signs vs "Star NFL player" resigns.
What if there's a line break after "re"?
@renerpho I believe the whole word should always go to the next line. If you wanna keep it neat, use justify instead of left align.
@@LaVieDeReine86 The rule to "avoid X where it may cause confusion" is such a spoilsport, isn't it?
@@renerpho yeah, it's why you have 'a' 'à' 'ou' 'où' and 'la' 'là' in French. Especially la being a definite article. If you read 'c'est la' without 'là' would be super vague and ambiguous.
I used to have a tee shirt that proved that commas saved lives. "Lets eat Grandma" as opposed to "lets eat, grandma"
What a marvellous, multitudinous melange of multisyllabic monstrosities! Magnificently manufactured and meticulously elucidated. (even if my alliteration fell down there at the end)
Meticulously and mellifluously! 😂
... mentioned!
Um...MOUTHED?
...meticulously manifested!
@@frankmerrill2366 Sure, but I was after something along the lines of explained, not just told and I couldn't think of an alliteration, so I went with the closest to an alliteration my mind could throw up at the moment.
The pair of you are such a highlight of my week. Congratulations on your ongoing delightful efforts!
In computer science, the discipline of internationalization is often abbreviated “i18n” with the 18 replacing the count of the intervening letters.
"l10n" being the other for "localization".
Actually, can you be certain that it isn't 'internationalisation'?
There's also a11y for "accessibility" and l10n for "localisation", and k8s for "kubernetes" (a container orchestration platform).
17:🎉🎉20 😮😮😂
😢😮😢😢 18:30
@@TheClintonio
😂
🎉😂
@@TheClintonio😂😂🎉
😂
"Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
Even though the sound of it Is something quite atrocious
If you say it long enough you will get halitosis
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis"
was a song I sang to myself about a half century ago. No one else thought it was funny
& just like the Middle English, your jingle took my eth away....
@@victoriafelix5932 Thank you for the lovely pun.
@@danwillits7954 Thank you. :)
a sad song about the symptoms of a disease of the lungs resulting from inhaling silico-volcanic rock. 😢
😂
@@keetrandling4530 by Igorrr? I thunk I 'eard 'bout dat un
You two are just adorable! ❤
I never comment on RUclips but I just had to say that while listening to the latter half of this I became engrossed in watching some ants crawling around on the floor and so the mention of the term "myrmecophilous" was incredibly appropriate. Great work as always Rob and Jess!
Also myrmecophagous which an adjective describing anteaters.
In cryptography, a nonce is an arbitrary number that can be used just once in a cryptographic communication. It is often a random or pseudo-random number. 22:44
Bertie says the word a few times in the P G Wodehouse books. In the context it seemed to mean "for the moment"?
Ahhhh... I love the sound of sesquipedalia in the morning! ;)
That smell, that sesquipedalia smell….
What do we have here, a pedaliaphile? Even better if you live in Sedalia. lol
I must admit I do find somewhat more than a pinch of pleasure in reading thence attempting to recite both Brennan’s Prose-verse-poster-algebraic-symbolico-riddle Musicopoematographoscope & his Pocket Musicopoematographoscope….
Jacob Rees Mogg was called "the member for the Eighteenth Century" - which is entirely appropriate.
I can think of other names
I look forward to each of these videos; you two play off each other beautifully.
I’m fond of the German word Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung (Motor vehicle liability insurance)and the stunningly specific Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän (captain of a Danube steamship company ship).
Welcome to the Finnish language.
😂
Compound words galore, but it's also a heavily synthetic language.
One of my favourite compund words is matalalattiaraitiovaunu (not especially long, but fun sounding). That's a tram with a lowered floor, except the word for tram in it's self is already a compound word. So it's low_floor_rail_waggon.
Then we can have a word almost like a whole sentence such as "minullakinkohan" "I have also (I wonder)?" or "kissoistammeko" "from our cats?". These can easily be made very long, but extreme tonguetwisters are usually not used for the sake of keeping things a bit easier on everybody.
Finnish is super difficult to learn at the start, but luckily it's quite logical and everything reads exactly as it's written (looking at you ENGLISH with a bombastic side eye!) So after the innitial hurdle it gets easier. Regardless of complex rules it's also quite flexible.
How strangely apt that the longest Words Unravelled video so far (I think?) is on the topic of the longest words. Almost poetic, in a way.
Hearing Rob day "innit?" brought to mind a possible episode topic: words that came about because of being shortened while speaking. Y'all already did "goodbye", but there's loads more
...just thought I'd say G'day...
It'd be a good one, nah'msayn?
Like "jeet" here in the US south for "did you eat?"
@@msnouveau jeetyet is the word here
Humongoamorphus - A word describing the distance between raised hands, that fishermen use to depict the fish that got away, which changes at each retelling.
Underappreciated word 😆
When Jacob Rees Mogg was an MP I recall him being referred to as the Honourable Member for the 18th century. I loved his dry wit and his sense of history and tradition.
As always I love the video. I was wondering if you had ever thought of doing one on proper nouns which have become adjectives.
The 2 which most readily come to mind for me are Billingsgate and Quisling
Japanese being a pro drop, agglutinative language, it's possible for one or two words to express what would be a full sentence in English. It's hard to explain why I love it so much without explain all the linguistic building blocks of Japanese syntax. もう食べすぎちゃった (mou tabesugichatta) translates as 'I have regretfully/unfortunately already eaten too much'
ですね
Tbf you can kind of do that it English too: 'I've overindulged.'
@@julius9055 over indulge is much more general though. 食べすぎちゃう means specifically to eat too much and feel remorse about it.
Multiphasicsystemicmicrooptimization.
Useful for explaining why you're late with your assignment.
Many superlong words in English happen to be in the medical field. If one desires to know those words, try that field. A suggestion for an upcoming episode would be phrases that revolve around animals, such as busy as a bee or a dog's life. There are many such phrases, most that don't have any obvious animal but are still derived from such.
P.S. what about the full name of Bangkok? (There's a famous rock song by a Thai band that repeats it over and over which I sometimes adds to my Llanfair learns as it way longer.
Are some numbers larger infinities than others (as can be true in math), when in word forms?
How about numbers like e or pi, if spelled out in words? Can they be both shortest and longest "words"?
Rob: antee, Jess: antay. Oh, the beauty of dialects and accents.
Yes minister described "antidisestablishmentarianismists"
Rob's face trying to match the color of his shirt 😂😂😂
Delighted I stumbled upon this channel!
Back in the 1970s while i was in 7th grade Antidisestablishmentarianism was a bonus spelling word my english teacher gave us one time. The definition he provided was extremely lazy and simplistic, and I didn’t learn the actual meaning until I was much older; but i always remembered the word itself, afterward. And now, thanks to you, I’ve learned the wonderful reason for it’s popularity (although to date, I’ve yet to meet another person who knows of it if I bring it up)
Jess, I just bought your books for my stepdaughter’s bday. She is an Englishteacher in Slovenia.❤
Thank you so much! - Jess
@@WordsUnravelled I am a retired teacher / Word Nerd. I just received the books and read parts of them before gifting. They are both so well done! Tyty
Finnish can verb a noun and noun a verb. So stringing these operations one after another will get you as long word in Finnish as you want. Meaning of the word can be lost on the way, but who cares when the idea is count the letters of a word.
I rather think Finnish as the wonderfull language that can have such words as "pääjääjäjäjäärä", which to my knowledge is the longest consecutive dots on letters as there can be in one word. The meaning of that compund word ravels from the middle. "Jäädä" means to stay, "jääjä" is one who stays, "pääjääjä" is from a group of those who stay the head one and if that "pääjääjä" is obnoxious eg. a "-jäärä" about it then they are "pääjääjäjäärä".
Having been teaching K-12 students to pronounce the full name of LlanfairPG (not going to write it all out here) through a song for decades now now I get to add this little tidbit to my lessons! YAY!
Now I understand why I heard of the word 'antidisestablishmentarianism' long before I understood what it meant.
I've been known to use the word basically in context, because in some ways that doctrine has indeed returned. Not in a good way.
What a wonderful episode. May I join the esteemed Mr. Edmund Blackadder in offering you my most enthusaiastic contrafibularities. Lest I become anaspeptic, phrasmotic, even compunctuous, I shall endeavour to cause you no pericombobulations, and leave interfrastically.
My favorites: defenestration & prestidigitation.
We. Love. Jess.
I love this podcast and you two are the coolest nerds around
I never knew I had a tribe. You folks are definitely it. ❤ Thanks for your awesome content!
I love you guys so much ❤ such a great show. Interesting and intellectual, but also so easy to listen to and take in. You guys are great. Never stop making these!
This channel is such a delight. Thank you!
Not a long word, but that German being literal word. The German word for “birth control pill” is “Antibabypille”.
Love the coffee mug. I'm not a coffee drinker, but I think it would be good for hot chocolate too.
....and it is not just the pulchritudinous Jess that knows this other word for Beautiful
Hypererudition syndrome: an exacerbated proclivity for polysyllabic vocabulature (likes big words)
aka "sesquipedalianism"?
@@ftumschk I'd like one of those foot and half longs please, beef and sauerkraut, extra mustard.
Love this podcast!
I don't agree that smiles is the longest word because of the mile between the messes, by that logic beLEAGUEred is even longer!
My favourite long German word is Zylinderkopfdichtungsinstandsetzungsarbeiten, which in the context of automobile repair, means "cylinder head gasket installation work"
So much fun!
Have you yet done an episode on words that are hard to spell? I'm a pretty good speller, but there are some words that always baffle me. Like the "d" word for explosively defecating -- how many r's? how many h's?
Not to mention the archaic variation with an "o" in it...
My late father would have loved this channel. His favourite made-up word was preanteipenultimate - i.e. the last but four in a series of items. Note: "Made-up" definitely requires a hyphen.
Mine too
I recently encountered the word preproantepenultimate - fifth last.
I once had an endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography, and I've enjoyed saying it occasionally ever since!
Sphygmomanometer is a very-long (not quite extremely-long) word that is truly a mouthful. Is deinstitutionalization the longest English word that is in somewhat-common usage?
Oh my goodness, My husband and a friend of his in High school looked up a bunch of long words to impress people and have a laugh, used this word "omphaloskepsis". He asked me if I knew the word when we were dating and I've heard him use this word through the years. He always has to remind me what it means. He wants to know if you know the word 'oral diadochokinesis. It's a word he learned in college majoring in Speech & Hearing. What fun this episode is.
@@donnashelton464 Doubting that The First Man had a navel?
Just a guess.
"English has ridiculously long words". German: "Hold my beer...."
38:22 I mis-heard “creativity” as “creazy mind” (/kri'eizi maind/), and just wanted to say I think “creazy” is a rather nice portmanteau of “creative” and “crazy”.
I had some friends who put out a poll on facebook the night before their wedding over how to merge their names, hyphenating in either direction or which portmanteau was preferred and everyone pointed out that one version sounded like a fantasy dragon name, so they chose that option.
There used to be a British TV quiz called Catchword. It had a round where three consonants came up and contestants had to say the longest word starting with the first, with the other two in there somewhere, not necessarily consecutively, in the same order. You'll be unsurprised to hear that pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovocanoconiosis and floccinaucinihilipilification came up quite regularly.
A very fun post. And it soooo brings to mind a long word (completely made up of course) in the 1960's show, My Favorite Martian: "Supermicrodistilatingliquichemicosis" -- I'm sure you can guess from which other made-up-word they got their inspiration. lol! Anyway, I only discovered your channel recently and have been loving it! 🙂
You two are so fun together.
Strictly, das Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz is the law (Gesetz) concerning the transfer (Übertragung) of responsibility (Aufgabe) for the supervision (Überwachung) of the labeling (Etikettierung) of beef (Rindfleisch).
So it's a law presiding over what needs to happen when I don't want to supervise the labelling of beef anymore and need to get someone else to do it?
It also only held the record for four years (1999-2003), when it was surpassed by the Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung.
I must thank you for giving me a word to cover my morning's activities before I sat down to watch your show. I had been engaging in antimyrmecophiloustic maneuvers about the house and took a break to ask ;is supercalifragilisticexpealidocious within the normal lexicography or is ti merely a Disneyism? Thanks again for your marvelous lipitongueimouthibrain twisters.
R. Webb
I learned floccinaucinihilipilification at school in the 1960s from our Latin master but he pronounced the first 4 syllables as "flocky nowky" and nihili with short "i"s, the same as in the "pili" part of the word
He is correct. In Latin the c always makes a k-sound. The soft c pronunciation is used by the catholic church coz of Italian influence.
I forgot about defenestration,(14), for a long time and only recently heard it again.
What a wonderful way of saying I threw it out of the window!! :-)
E.g. A rock star was charged with defenestrating a television from a hotel!
I'm pretty sure that Dichlorfluoromethane is also used as a refrigerant gas. ...at least it used to be. as a florocarbon it's been replaced by another refrigerant called R-134a that's less deleterious to the atmosphere if accidentally released. (we referred to the previous gas as R-12, you may have heard of it by that name)
I sometimes get reminded of speaking an agglutinative language, when I casually happen to write message to friend with a word so long it doesn't fit to my phone's screen and gets forcibly cut in middle. Bummer it's usually not because of agglutination but some kind of compound like the good old "lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas", which is something like "aeroplane jet turbine motor assistant mechanic non-commissioned officer-in-training" in Finnish, and apparently in proper use as a rank and not just made up. Not sure though, it's just what I've heard!
Agglutination is also used in biochemistry.
I would like to hear you and Jess talk about the "regulation" of language. For example L'acadamie francaise regulates the words "Le Weekend" which by law must be replaced on publication with "la fin de semaine". How has this constrained the development of French for example.
It would interest me as well. L'Académie Française is very reticent to accept neologisms and words coming directly from english into the "correct" French language. This means that there is one main organism that dictates what words the students in several countries can use in texts. I've never heard of such a control on language happening in English. I'm often astounded by the number of neologisms that are accepted in English dictionaries. Really curious about the whole process of "accepting" new words.
@@tomrio9152 Yes, there is no "French Academy" equivalent for English, and the difference goes to the heart of the Anglophone culture. Oxford used to require a defense of an unfamiliar word in scholarly papers by a citation of an authoritative precedent, but nothing like an attempt to enforce such a standard generally has happened or has been thinkable (aside from the international "political correctness" phenomenon). The French authorities are afraid, with reason, of Europe gradually merging linguistically into the Anglosphere. This is less a concern for the Anglosphere both because none of the external influences on English are as powerful as the influences of English on others, and because if we were going to start preventing foreign influences from infecting English, we are starting a few centuries too late. English thrives on absorbing foreign words and constructions, and it's word order syntax facilitates it.
What we call "the weekend" should really be "the weekends" - like bookends.
@@tomrio9152Add to that the issue of the degree to which francophone countries outside France adhere to l'Académie's prescribed "official" neologisms (or not)... FWIW, I was in uni at the time l'Académie revamped pretty much the entire engineering and computer science lexicon...
Agglutinative isn't just adding endings, many have infixes like Georgian, Turkish, Tagalog, Thai/Lao and many New World languages.
I don't think Turkish has infixes, but Arabic definitely does.
@@AJansenNL Thai and Lao have some really long words and names. The longest capitol name in the world is Bangkok in Thai "Krung Thep Maha Nakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahintharayutthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Phiman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam Prasit". But it only has a few longer words in it "กรุงเทพมหานคร อมรรัตนโกสินทร์ มหินทรายุธยามหาดิลก ภพนพรัตน์ ราชธานีบุรีรมย์ อุดมราชนิเวศน์ มหาสถาน อมรพิมาน อวตารสถิต สักกะทัตติยะ วิษณุกรรมประสิทธิ์".
I was looking for this. And don't forget prefixes, which even English has.
Agglutinating languages are languages which combine many morphemes into few words.
Many of the indigenous languages of North America are agglutinative, most notably Inuktitut.
You two get more enjoyable every episode.
Ever considered doing a theatertour together? That would be fabulous.
Big fan of this channel. Great job, Rob and Jess. Is this how we request subjects for videos? Would it be interesting to talk about the etymology of words that have several meanings such as STRIKE. Strike to hit, strike to miss in baseball, strike to take down a set in theater, and strike to organize the workers to not work in order to pressure the management of a business (like Beoing is doing now). Did all these uses come from the same origin? This might a silly or boring subject :P Anyway, thanks for the great and entertaining videos!
Great episode as always. I do have a question though. What is a word? In English we tend to think of a word as a series of letters between spaces and/or punctuation marks or as component parts of a sentence. Does this definition also apply to the exceptionally long German or Greek 'words' or are they simply sentences/phrases in and of themselves (just without spaces) rather than components of sentences?
I love this channel! I have always taken a dictionary into the bathroom to keep from being bored! Short attention span! My favorite things to look up are people's names! What is the name's meaning, its origin and other similar names!
9:44, what is the difference between think and know?
A video I thought of that you guys could do is one where given words have a ridiculous number of meanings like "set" and "rose". Another one would be all the manifold meanings prepositional verbs can have like "toss up", "make up", et al.
Or, for that matter, the depth and multiple uses of SHIT. Pretty insane.
You mentioned Finnish, so here is a Finnish word nerd classic: epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydelllänsäkäänköpähän -- my translation: "presumably not even with his/her inability to unsystematize, I wonder?"
Or its. I figure it could refer to the language or the word itself.
Many ancient languages didn't use punctuation between words. So part of being literate meant being able to break up the words but where one "word" ended and the other began didn't really have a physical distinction and so a what is a word could be up to interpretation.
The mug is great, gotta have one! Unfortunately, I didn't find the mug in the store ...
This thumbnail is a great visual summary of the show's vibe. :D
Would you consider doing an episode on negatives and negation? There are so many prefixes that can be used to negate a word in English, just a few examples, anti, de, in, non, un, among many others. Sometimes a word will have two negatives, which are not quite interchangeable, which could be perhaps described as a ''soft negative'' and a ''hard negative''.
Or, a word will have two different negatives, to use the antonym of the root word in two different senses. The one that immediately comes to mind are uninterested and disinterested, which definitely do not mean the same thing.
And there are "soft" and "hard" positives: I SHALL is "harder" than I WILL.
1) hypothesis: the fact that English has emerged in societies which included writing and matured parallel to the printing press disincentivizes the formation of compound words (potentially due to the differences between visual and aural processing) and also makes composing in metered, rhyming verse difficult. In ancient societies, where information and literature was solely or primarily preserved and distributed through memorized and recited/chanted/sung metered rhyming verse, it was necessary to be able to smoosh (technical term) words into compounds. Greek is great at this. Latin is better at this than at being a practical language for daily conversation, and Sanskrit takes home the gold as a language that compounds words from compound words and drops or combines sounds, so that a word or phrase can have multiple meanings and multiple layers of interpretation, depending on how many layers of etymological evolution one digs into.
2) my favorite German compound is not super long, but is delightfully accurate: windschutzscheibe. "Wind protection slice. " aka windshield.
Depivotification is a term I’ve coined that describes the movement to rid the world of the overuse of the corporate buzz words, especially the dreaded ‘pivot’.
Ref "pulchritude", Francis Galton was totally sold on the idea of quantification. This extended to an index of feminine pulchritude. His method involved overlaying photographs of faces to create an average physiognomy as a baseline. Galton is credited with the invention of statistical regression and the logNormal distribution as well as being a pioneer of the eugenics movement.
I gave up reading through that greek word too... But what is interesting is the way Jess read out the bits vs how I would have, and that pertains to what Rob was saying about understanding the components of a composite word like that. Jess paused at random (and really uncomfortable to me) mid-word places because for her it's just a letter train rather than a word train.
You are both very eloquent, charming and sweet. Your interest in languages inspire me so much, that when you were near the end, after a quite lengthy and very entertaining as well as informative, inspiring and downright adventurous forty minutes, Rob said that it was near the ending, I actually wanted more! And I am a no-BS-guy, my motto (French? "mot"? Italian: motto?) is get to the point, and don't ever even say: "Without further ado, let's get tothe point!"
My enthusiasm could be due to my personal interest in etymology, as well as all the other sciences about human made things (and also natural sciences of course, but that's is "The Other Side" "wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more say no more (M. Python) ;-) ;-)
But it is definitely mainly because of your brilliance both of you, as your differences compliment each other. It is like music in some ways. A symphony. There must be a word for not playing music together, but doing what you do together. Bonafidelo-colabora-syngeno-evolutio-creationism? Nah.
And to camera two:
What's up with "yea no yea"? When did it start, and is it finally going away like covid? Or merely replaced with Ozzy Man's "Yes... nah yea!"? Moron this in Daffuture! Or maybe not.
"Language is a virus" sang Laurie Anderson. If so, I can never get sick of it, until I think the worst, and then believe it myself. Language is for better and for words....
My favourite word is sesquipedalian, and I like to use it in this little motto I devised several years ago: "Why use 3 short words, when a quatrain of sesquipedalian dialogue will suffice?" I must get one of your 'Word Nerd' mugs! Also, I now live not far from Llanfair PG (as it's known locally), but learnt how to pronounce it when I was 14 and living in Somerset.
I have a friend in Detroit (and born there) who can pronounce the full Llanfair... flawlessly.
Can you make a video about words being used only as part of expressions? For example “sinker” in “hook, line and sinker”, or “ulterior” in “ulterior motive”
Nonce can also mean "for the time being". I've encountered it quite a bit in that sense in English literature from a hundred years ago. The switch to its current, more sinister usage must be fairly recent.
Another word that has changed in meaning dramatically over the past century is diddling - Edgar Allan Poe wrote an entire story entitled "Diddling considered as one of the exact sciences", where in this context the word means a confidence game. Don't try to use the word today in that sense today though, nobody will get it, and it may get you in a lot of trouble!
Nobody working in the field actually refers to a protein by listing each individual amino acid in order in word form! We use the sequence, but as data, not the name. The closest to using such a name is when referring to relatively short peptides, i.e., an oligopeptide.
I like words that can compound in Scrabble. Line to masculine to hypermasculine is one(or three) I've used myself. It's possibly hyphenated but unless your opponent is sure, they won't challenge you
These aren’t long word, just words I’m curious about. Beforehand & afterward and other similar words; collective nouns, mass nouns, nouns that are the same when singular or plural. Love the channel, so interesting and fun.