English, the language…..Ufff

Episode- 1

Do you know which the longest word in English is?

“Floccinaucinihilipilification”, pronounced as flok-suh-naw-suh-nahy-hil-uh-pil-uh-fi-key-shuhn, with 29 letters is the longest non-technical word in the language.

This tongue twister reminds me of Prof. Parimal Tripathi, of movie "Chupke-Chupke ", reciting “English is a funny language”.

Dictionary.com says that it means “estimation of something as valueless”. Invented by an Etonian, it’s concatenation of four Latin words, flocci + nauci + nihili + pili, each of which lies in the vicinity of “valueless”. Any mathematician would agree with “0 + 0 + 0 + 0 = 0”.

Instead of finalizing among “flocci-fication”, “nauci-fication”, “nihili-fication” and “pili-fication”, all four were married to the suffix. Weird marriage, weirder result.

On a closer look one finds that the arrangement is in alphabetical order (here, mathematicians will be at loss), seemingly in an attempt not to displease any of the brides; I would have made it dramatic by tossing a coin.

I shall go one step further and suggest to replace it with "Estimationofsomethinguseless", which is a letter smaller and explicit in meaning.

At last I will say “English…..Ufff”.