Sad news from Germany: the British Telegraph reported this
week that the Germans are decommissioning what seems to have been the
language’s longest word, the little mouthful that is the title of my
post today.
The term, which the Telegraph translates as “law delegating
beef label monitoring,” apparently arose during the 1990s in response to
bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Spawned by a crisis, the R-word may
now be the first linguistic fatality attributable to mad cow disease.
It is perhaps too easy to giggle at the agglutinative property of
German nouns. It’s one of the ways the German language works, as if word
components came with Velcro tabs. For decades, this feature of the
language was a gold mine to Anglophone comedy writers, for whom German
sounded funny and funny in a particular way (and for historical as well
as linguistic reasons). While that form of humor has largely faded, the
mystery of these giant linguistic fauna endures. They can perplex and
repel, but they are not without interest.
So to their defense: As ours is the world of IMs and tweets, I come to praise long words, not to bury them.
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