The Longest Word
I still can't come quite to writing my follow-up on the U.S. Constitution and my concerns. A lot of this, as I mentioned to Gordon the other day on the phone, in the midst of an interesting but ramblin' conversation, is because there's just so much to know and so little that I actually do.
So we'll go here, instead. In the 20 years (1963-1983) that I was either officially in school or thinking about going back (there were three years in the wilderness), at some point I learned that the longest word in the English language was "disestablishmentarianism," all 28 letters.
Words can make you crazy. Making my living with words, I say this with conviction, being sort of crazy. Although maybe you can't blame it all on words.
"Disestablishmentarianism" is a bulky word but a legitimate one, in my opinion, consisting, as legitimate big words can do, of a verb with two prefixes and three suffixes that undergo a midlife grammar change and become something altogether different.
Its place in history is questionable, and actually not authentic, at least not anymore. "Floccinaucinihilipilification" has 29 letters and and is pretty legitimate, too, if a little obscure (it means categorizing something as worthless or trivial). I think that's the winner, although even William F. Buckley probably shies away from using it in public.
The longest word most often listed in English is "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis," a respiratory illness affecting miners, but I'm not buying it. I think you can misuse a combining form and this is a good example, at 45 letters.
(A combining form is a structure that allows two or more words to merge, often using the letter "o." As in "Islamofascist" or "lumbosacral." Or "immunocompromised." Combining forms are handy but I think they can get pretty bogus. And then there are those who don't understand, and want to write "lumbo-sacral," which is disgusting. But I'm a little crazy, as mentioned).
And there are longer (mostly scientific, and most using our combining form friend) words, but let's stick with #2 (or #3...sigh, whatever) because it's easier.
We start with "establish," a perfectly good verb. We make it a noun by adding "ment." No sweat. Add the suffix "arian" and we get someone who favors establishing stuff, I guess (I'm not using a dictionary). Add "ism" and it becomes doctrine, an ideology, a system of thinking. An establishmentarian, I assume, believes strongly in the establishment of something, and people who are like that worship the creed of ism. No problem so far.
So let's dis it.
"Disestablishmentarianism" means, then, a particular opposition to the idea of establishment of something (I really, really hope some of you are catching on now or I'm gonna feel pretty dumb). And since English is an awkward but functional and evolving language, it's time to look at history, and "disestablishmentarianism" (yes, I'm really tired of typing that) can be traced to an antipathy toward the Church of England.
Now you're all on board. I hope.
I suppose the Church of England itself could be called DEM (sorry; my fingers are getting sore), but in a U.S. sense the first DEM, or the most prominent in a historical sense, was Thomas Jefferson, who is said to have coined the phrase "separation of church and state" and fought to have his home state of Virginia free from the auspices of an official church presence, and was a proponent of the Bill of Rights, in which the First Amendment forbid the establishment of a national religion.
His contemporaries often referred to Jefferson as an atheist, but history doesn't really support this. We can't reach back two centuries and explore the spiritual thinking of a complicated man, but the historical consensus is that our third president was a Deist, a monotheist, a spiritual philosopher who eschewed doctrine and believed whole-heartedly in freedom. Except for some of his slaves, but then we all have our bad days.
And so my "longest word" from the eighth grade reaches out and touches me here, in my mid-40s, all those classes ago. "Antidisestablishmentarianism" is an idea that confronts separation of church and state.
And it is alive and well.
I have lots to say, but I still need some facts to straighten out. So I will just say this.
As I mentioned in an earlier piece, the foremost supporter of the U.S. Constitution in its ratification period was Alexander Hamilton, himself a wanderer along spiritual planes but generally a believer in an awesome God. And when asked why the word "God" was not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, the construction of which he played a pivotal role, he said, "We forgot."
Hamilton did not forget things. He was sort of crazy about that. And you didn't want to get him started on combining forms.
They were scared of factions. Factions would arise, actually fairly quickly. but I think their hearts were in the right place.
And I will say this, thanks to my wife.
Jesus was tempted in the desert by power, and passed.
And I wonder if James Dobson knows that, and if Jefferson did, and what's the difference, and why, and what I think about it.
I'm pretty close, now.
4:35:02 PM 
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