A Wordy Post

We like words at our house. Long words are particularly fun. When I was a kid, I loved participating in the spelling bee, and the longest, weirdest words were my favorite ones. One of the first words I remember loving was antidisestablishmentarianism. It was just beautiful in all of its prefix-suffix glory.

Well, my son has inherited my passion, and we've been talking about long words for the past day or two. It all started when my in-laws called after their visit to Hawaii. They happened to mention that the name of the state fish in Hawaii is the humuhumunukunukuapua'a, which essentially means "triggerfish with a snout like a pig." (also called the Reef Triggerfish) Upon hearing this, he immediately said, "Hey, that's like the song in High School Musical 2!" Yep, he's ten years old.

So then he was saying humuhumunukunukuapua'a over and over again, just because, well, he could. It's an amazing thing when you can say a word that has more letters than the number of years you've been alive.

For those of you over age 21, though, that one isn't quite as impressive. Here's one you can try though. It is the name of a lake in Connecticut, about halfway between Boston and Hartford. Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. There was actually a dispute a few years back that the signage for the lake was spelled wrong. I'm not sure who it was that noticed or who claims to be the official speller of the 45-letter lake name, but there you have it.

So all night last night, he was practicing saying Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. He did finally get it down, but was having a hard time remembering that the lake was in Connecticut instead of Kentucky.

Also, you've probably heard of synonyms and antonyms, but have you heard of contronyms? It's a whole classification for words that are their own antonyms -- like
* cleave (which means to hold to, or to cut apart), or
* strike (which means to miss, or to hit) or
* dust (which means to remove dust from, or to apply a light layer to). Fascinating.

What are YOUR favorite words? Queue? Parallelepiped? Xanthosis?