(Still puttering on the next issue of Journal of Wordplay—but I pre-wrote this entry a while back!)
Word Ways Volume 1, Number 4 came out in the fall of 1968, and it’s intriguing to see what’s changed.
In “The Power of X,” Dmitri Borgmann wowed readers by finding four words that used a double x: XX-DISEASE (affecting cattle), baseball legend James E. FOXX, editor James F. FIXX, and Maltese town NAXXAR.
Since then, we’ve seen the corporate rise of EXXON and EXXONMOBIL, the modern terms VAXXING and DOXXING and their derivatives, the card game FLUXX, rocker Nikki SIXX (who was 10 years old in 1968), the band The FIXX, TV series LEXX, video game ZAXXON, and two actors carrying on the FOXX name: Redd and Jamie. And that’s still not a complete list!
Borgmann also noted, “It is claimed that the longest French word is a 25-letter specimen, ANTICONSTITUTIONNELLEMENT (‘anticonstitutionally’). Likewise, it is claimed that the longest French place name is the hyphenated, 33-letter ROCHE-SUR LINOTE-ET-SORANS-LES-CORDIERS. These supposed records are pitiful compared with the corresponding English champions. Can any reader produce superior French examples?”
The French language is a bit more regulated than English, thanks to the continuing influence of the Academie Francaise: “anticonstitutionnellement” does seem to be the longest word in most French dictionaries. Longer words are used in French, it’s just that the Academy members don’t grant them official status. I guess they have a certain hippopotomonstrosesquipédaliophobie (fear of long words, 35 letters). You can discuss that with French-speakers in Saint-Remy-en-Bouzemont-Saint-Genest-et-Isson (38 letters).
Alan L. Wachtel looked into whether any words employed all six vowels in reverse order (and only one of each). He came up with YULOIDEA and CRYPTUROIDEA—both scientific family names in biology, one obsolete and one coined.
I don’t have any elegant single-word solutions here, but if we’re including phrases that appear as entries in some dictionaries, there is SYRUP OF IPECAC. It’s an expectorant you might need after an hour or so practicing your vowel sounds.
Finally, Walter G. Leight published this “Exercise in Heteronymy,” a shaggy-dog sentence filled with words that only look the same. It’s worth repeating in full, though you might find it challenging to read aloud…I sure did! All of its many paired words are pronounced in two different ways—except one, which could have been pronounced in two different ways but doesn’t appear to be.
Good luck finding it. 😛
To resume and present a résumé of the present discourse: inter alia, one can discourse and tear about and produce quite a row if an appropriate subject for an invalid project delegates an invalid to shed a tear in torment as he tries to row a tug, a tower of produce barges, past a tower in which some delegates, content with the compact, eat pâté before the entrance to a compact console and, trying to entrance, console, or torment themselves with the content of a gill of gin, happen to subject the pate of a live sow, about to sow, diffuse and inter its refuse in the desert, to the prick of a minute fish gill, the diffuse pain to live for less than a minute, thereby causing the object of attention to refuse to desert its corner, object forte, but, at the close, project herself violently close to the bow of the lead boat, cased in lead, making its masts bow and the vessel duplicate the motions of a lame duck, clothed in ragged lame, which tries to appropriate to itself a duplicate permit which would permit it to convert its forte to that of a convert in a commune trying to commune with does which are ragged and dogged by dogged men who discharge their duties after discharge from service, just as (I estimate and intimate) each intimate friend does when, without elaborate excuse and in deliberate fashion, he proceeds to meet with others to estimate proceeds and to deliberate the import of actions which excuse them if they elaborate on a contract to import at a discount, but discount their resolve to solve new and resolve old problems which combine to make the combine contract in precipitate manner and develop a complex if it tries to extract and animate the complex precipitate of an extract from matter which is not animate.