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By Things you always never wanted to know
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Friday, October 24, 2003
A 45 letter word connoting a lung disease, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, is the longest word in Webster's Third New International Dictionary. The longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary means the act of estimating as worthless, floccipaucinihilipilification, which has 29 letters.
A major contributor to the first Oxford English Dictionary was a longtime inmate of Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Dr. W.C. Minor, incarcerated for a street murder brought on by persecution mania, submitted 12,000 sources in one year alone. He had been a surgeon-captain in the Army of the North in the U.S. Civil War and suffered his first mental breakdown when ordered to brand a soldier who had deserted.
In the same first Oxford English Dictionary there is a 23-page essay on the word "set" written by word lover Henry Bradley, who evidently had all the time in the world.
The inhabitants of a slum called Trastevere, near Rome, speak a dialect all their own. They claim to have more than 2,000 vulgar words to describe the human genitalia.
The Polish actress Helena Modjeska (1844-1909) was popular with audiences for her realistic and emotional style of acting. She once gave a dramatic reading in her native tongue at a dinner party of people who didn't know Polish, and her listeners were in tears when she finished. It turned out she had merely recited the Polish alphabet.
The literal meaning of "lady," in its Old English form "hlaefdige" (through the Middle English "lafdi, ladi") is "loaf-kneader."
Mithdradates (c. 131 - 63 B.C.E.), the great king of Pontus and enemy of Rome, is said to have swallowed toxic substances systematically, increasing the doses until he made himself immune from assassination by poison. Ironically, when he was defeated and cornered by the Romans, he tried to commit suicide by poison, only to find that it had no effect. He had to get a soldier to kill him with a sword.
The most ancient report of a solar eclipse is in Chinese records. The eclipse came without warning, according to legends, because the royal astronomers, Hsi and Ho, were too drunk to make the necessary computations. They were executed - the only astronomers known to have been killed for dereliction of duty.
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