The Longest Word in the World (Part One)

If anybody tells you that the longest word in the English language is Antidisestablishmentarianism, you know right away that they're full of the brown stuff. Though that's certainly a pretty long word, anyone in the know knows that this famous example was just the first thing Noah Webster could pull out of his ass when a reporter asked him the question, since he didn't want to look like an idiot and lose his title as "Mr. Word." In reality, there's no such thing as the longest word, since whatever word somebody suggests, you can just add "-ish" on the end and totally blow their minds. That's the kind of thing they teach you in college.

It's like trying to think of the biggest number. Some smartass can always come along and say "Oh yeah? What about that number… plus one?" Try it, it works in both cases. Just when you think you've got a real contender for world's longest word, say something like Postantefornicatetopiatacosushilumpfistgrapefruitdingdongery, right when your head starts to swell up big some joker will pop out of the woodwork and say "Not bad, but what about Postantefornicatetopiatacosushilumpfistgrapefruitdingdongerish?" And no matter how you kill them, you're still going to jail.

But just because there isn't actually a longest word in the world, doesn't mean that people haven't given their lives over the centuries to the insane quest to find it.

In 1096 A.D., the William the Conqueror, King of England, ordered a crusade to the Holy Land to find the longest word in the world. Nobody had any idea where the longest word actually might be, but the Middle East seemed like as good a place as any to start looking, since people over there were naming their kids things like Ptolenamonemy and Dodecazoroaster. It obviously wasn't in the Orient, since everyone over there was named Hin and Xi, so they clearly had no taste for long words. And even if they had, opinions were split over whether it would have counted or not, since a bunch of drawings of houses and cranes in a row just didn't make a word look all that impressively long.

Granted, the William the Conqueror didn't go to the Middle East himself, since that place was crawling with crazy religious fucks just drooling to chop off a white man's head with a dull bread knife, so he sent his son Dave instead. Dave the Conqueror was joined by Marcus Bonehound of Italy, and a Frenchman whose name nobody could remember, but everybody was pretty well certain he had been there. They were accompanied by a ragtag gang of zealots who had a lot of time on their hands and strong opinions about word length.

The Crusades lasted for over 250 years and resulted in the deaths of millions, but the longest word any of them could come up with was the Icelandic hæstaréttarmálaflutningsmaður, a 29-letter word which means "the sweat off a barrister's balls." How in the world they discovered an obscure Icelandic word in Jerusalem is anyone's guess, though most historians explain that Marcus Bonehound thought Icelandic chicks were red hot, and just leave it at that.

A second set of Crusades by the doggedly thorough English led to the discovery of the Turkish word çekoslovakyalilastiramadiklarimizdanmisiniz, 43 letters of drivel meaning "Aren't you one of those ding-dongs from Czechoslovakia?" This satisfied westerners for a few hundred years, until the Queen of Spain got a bee up her ass in 1500 A.D. and demanded that Columbus go find her the world's longest word, for the goddamed glory of Spain.

Columbus came back after the seventh year of his heavily-funded quest with the news that the longest word in the world was "smiles," because there's a mile between the first and last letters. After the court realized he wasn't joking, a private investigation discovered that Columbus had taken the court's money and spent the last seven years drunk and basking naked on the beach in Jamaica. The great explorer was promptly beheaded and had his cheeks glued to his teeth in a permanent smile, his head then displayed in a jar in the royal chambers for the better part of two decades as a reminder to the lazy and humorous.

Join us next time when we continue the thrilling story of the longest word in the world. Until then, I'm Griswald Dreck.

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