Our public library possesses an enchanting array of rare and valuable books, but as John Lennon once said, “Possession isn’t nine-tenths of the law. It’s nine-tenths of the problem.”  Now that he and Queen Elizabeth II are both in the Great Beyond, I wonder if he mentions the many possessions she left behind.  “30 Surprising Things Queen Elizabeth II Owns,” a Mental Floss article by Jennifer Wood that predated her demise, noted that QEII possessed a lot of property (the UK’s entire continental shelf, half its shoreline, and the seabed extending out twelve miles, along with Westminster Abbey, Hyde Park, Trafalgar Square, Gibraltar, six royal palatial and castle residences, not to mention Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (at least technically).  Besides load of jewels, Elizabeth also liked nicknacks: 150,000 works of art (“many priceless”), Queen Victoria’s sketchbook, a 600-piece collection of Faberge eggs and accessories, a private ATM, and over 200 Launer handbags (“at approximately $2,500 a pop”).  Then there were her animals: all swans living on the River Thames, all of UK’s dolphins, “a winning team of racehorses,” a bat colony living inside Balmoral Castle, and two tortoises (housed in the London Zoo).   She possessed none of her beloved Pembroke Welsh corgis, however, deciding in 2015 when the last one died that she wouldn’t leave any behind at her demise.  But she did own two dorgis, “a cross between a corgi and a dachshund,” named Vulcan and Candy.  Cats are noticeably absent, but as Melanie Aman wrote in Woman’s World, “As it turns out, the queen is reportedly allergic to cats, and no, we’re not ‘kitten’ you.”  So she probably never wondered “Why Do Cats Respond To Pspsp,” but on his vetexplainspets.com site Dr. Jess wrote “There are several theories as to why cats respond to ‘pspsps’. One popular explanation is that the sound mimics the high-pitched noises that small prey animals make …. Another theory is that the sound is simply attention-grabbing for cats, who are curious and easily intrigued by new sounds and stimuli.”  Mental Floss writer Ellen Gutosky suggested “Cats can hear sounds at higher frequencies than humans, and the s sound operates at a higher frequency than most other human sounds. When each s sound is interrupted by a p … it creates a staccato sound that is abrupt and attention-grabbing.”  And since “Pspsps stands out from whatever else humans are usually saying, cats may be more inclined to investigate where it’s coming from.” 

It’s kind of like another short word: “psst,” which Oxford Learners Dictionary defines as “the way of writing the sound people make when they want to attract somebody’s attention secretly or quietly.”  Psst differs markedly from Collin’s Dictionary’s 2024 Worth of the Year: brat, which they define as “characterized by a confident, independent, and hedonistic.”  The shortest English words are single letters, like “A” and “I,” but brings to mind Benjamin Whorf, the exceptional linguist I mentioned in a recent column.  Among his many innovations was the concept of the allophone, a spoken sound (or “phones”) that is used to pronounce a single phoneme (defined by the American Heritage Dictionary (AHD) as a the “smallest phonetic unit in a language that is capable of conveying a distinction in meaning, as the m of mat and the b of bat in English. The AHD used “T” as an example of a letter being multiple allophones: “the aspirated t of top, the unaspirated t of stop, and the tt (pronounced as a flap) of batter are allophones of the English phoneme /t/.”

On the other hand, an article by Erin McCarthy, asks “What’s the Longest Word in English?”  She wrote, “Forget antidisestablishmentarianism: If you can find a way to work pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis into a conversation, congratulations! You’ve just managed to use the longest defined word you’ll find in any dictionary.”  The Oxford English Dictionary defines the 45-letter-long word as “a disease that causes an inflammation of the lungs due to the inhalation of very fine silicate or quartz dust.”  The OED added that the term was likely coined by an unnamed president of the National Puzzlers’ League in the 1930s “in imitation of polysyllabic medical terms, but occurring only as an instance of a very long word.” In other words, it “was created simply to be long.”  It’s also the longest word in the OED, despite being a ghost word, which Webster’s says is “a word form never in established usage.”  A bunch of long words fit that description, especially words hammered together to form compounds.  For instance, the Online Etymology Dictionary says the noun “floccinaucinihilipilification” means “action or habit of estimating as worthless, in popular smarty-pants use from c. 1963.”  It originated in 1741in a letter by William Shenstone in which he combined “four Latin words (flocci, nauci, nihili, pili) all signifying ‘at a small price’ or ‘for nothing,” and added the Latin suffix -fication, “making, causing.”

The Germans are famed for their long, compounded words.  For instance, there’s a 63-letter example that begins “Rindfleischetikettierungs…” “that translates to ‘the law for the delegation of monitoring beef labeling’ and was removed from law books in the country in 2013.”  That’s puny compared to the longest word in the world, a Sanskrit compound expression 195 letters long (that translates into 428 letters in the Roman alphabet) that begins “Nirantarāndhakāritā…” and means “In it, the distress, caused by thirst, to travelers was alleviated by clusters of rays of the bright eyes of the girls; the rays that were shaming the currents of light, sweet and cold water charged with the strong fragrance of cardamom, clove, saffron, camphor and musk and flowing out of the pitchers (held in) the lotus-like hands of maidens (seated in) the beautiful water-sheds, made of the thick roots of mixed with marjoram, (and built near) the foot, covered with heaps of couch-like soft sand, of the clusters of newly sprouting mango trees, which constantly darkened the intermediate space of the quarters, and which looked all the more charming on account of the trickling drops of the floral juice, which thus caused the delusion of a row of thick rainy clouds, densely filled with abundant nectar.”

Medical compound words are even more extreme, like the protein nicknamed “titin” that begins “Methionylthreo…” and runs to 189,819 letters and takes more than three hours to pronounce.  Unless you’re a fast-talker like Steve Woodmore, a British electronics salesman who once held the Guinness record for faster talker by articulating 637 words a minute. “His ability to articulate at such a fast rate [was] apparently due to his recruiting more portions of his brain to the task than the average person, as shown in an fMRI scan.” He’s since been surpassed by Canadian Sean Shannon who can spit out 650 words per minute.  According to Woodmore’s Wikipedia page, he “first realized his skills at rapid speech when he was seven years old. At school, he was asked by his form teacher to recite an 8-minute speech, as a punishment for his talkativeness. It took him only two minutes.”  Imagine how thrilled his teacher was that little brat (as in Webster’s “an ill-mannered annoying child”).  He died of Covid in 2023.

            There are times when speaking up is important, but Adam Grant wrote in the NYTimes that “Women Know Exactly What They’re Doing When They Use ‘Weak Language’.”  He cited studies showing that instead of getting results when women use forceful language in the workplace, those “who use weak language when they ask for raises are more likely to get them.”  He also wrote “[n]ew evidence reveals that it’s not ambition per se that women are being penalized for …. The problem arises if people perceive them to be forceful, controlling, commanding, and outspoken … “Instead of being judged just on their performance,

They are dinged for their personality.”  It would have been interesting to hear how the bluestocking ladies in 18^th-century England would have responded to that.  Britannica.com says the Bluestockings were “any of a group of women who in mid-18th-century England held conversations to which they invited men of letters and members of the aristocracy with literary interests.”  By inviting women as well as men like “Dictionary” Samuel Johnson, actor David Garrick, painter Joshua Reynolds, and botanist Benjamin Stillingfleet to their non-alcoholic intellectual gatherings, the Bluestockings expanded on the earlier French soirees in which prominent women invited prominent men to evenings of wine, games, and witty conversation.   Soon bluestocking “came to be applied derisively to a woman who affects literary or learned interests.”  However, it was a man who was responsible for their name.  According to “Sex and Sensibility,” an excellent New Yorker article by Margaret Talbot, Stillingfleet often rushed from his gardening to a meeting and “often neglected to change his casual, blue worsted stockings for the silken white ones that men usually donned for such occasions.  The term caught on to imply a kind of informality, a way of valuing intellectual endeavors above fashion.”  As old Democritus wrote around 400 BCE, “Happiness resides not in possessions, and not in gold, happiness dwells in the soul.”