Have you ever wondered how the very first words spoken by mankind were created? Just imagine a prehistoric person, having just knocked a would-be invader unconscious with a club, trying to verbalize the equivalent of, “That’ll teach the son-of-a-bitch!”

Somehow, just grunting “Ugh!” doesn’t seem as satisfying.

I’m not a talented linguist, though I’ve always wished I were. However, I did study Russian as my second language, and while I never achieved fluency, I can carry on a fairly decent conversation — as long as the other person speaks slowly and clearly enough.

It’s a somewhat tongue-twisting language, largely due to the frequent clumping together of numerous consonants without the bother of a lot of vowels. For example — and this is my best stab at an English transliteration — there is the word “vstrechat,” which means “to meet.”

First of all, it’s a two-syllable word, with the stress on the second syllable. Next, remember that the “v” is pronounced like an “f,” and you have to manage to wrap your tongue (and your teeth) around the first four consonants — “vstr” — simultaneously. And by the way, don’t forget to pronounce the “r” with a slight roll of the tongue . . .

I hope I haven’t lost you yet. Because once I started down this path, it led me to some of the longest Russian words I could recall, which is where the fun really begins. Let’s start with . . .

“Dostoprimechatelnosti”” (“landmarks” or “sights,” as in “walking around town to look at the sights”). After all, why settle for one or two syllables when you can stretch it to eight . . . right?

And then there’s my personal favorite: “chelovekonenavistnichestvo.” It has ten syllables, and it means “misanthropy” — itself a cool English word meaning hatred of mankind. Now, that’s a concept we’ve all become much too familiar with lately, so it might actually come in handy one day.

And there are a few that are even lengthier. Supposedly the longest, at 47 letters, is “metilpropenilendigidroksitsinnamenilakrilicheskiy,” which in English refers to “methylpropenylenedihydroxycinnamemenylacrylic acid.”

I hope that clarifies things for you.

But it’s not only the Russians who love to string letters together like those paper chains we used to make out of red and green construction paper for Christmas decorations. The Germans are really good at cramming an entire phrase into a single, unpronounceable word. In fact, I found a couple that each contained an astonishing 79 letters.

But it’s not likely that anyone — even a native-born German speaker — would ever try to pronounce them, much less use them in a sentence. So I’ll just give you the definitions. One stands for “a law concerning the delegation of duties for the supervision of cattle marking and the labelling of beef”; and the other is the name for “a subordinate official association of the Danube Steamship Company.”

Try working either of those into a conversation at your next social gathering, and see what it does to your popularity rating.

By this time, if you haven’t dozed off, you might be wondering if we English speakers have any hope of competing with the Slavic and Germanic linguists in this category. And you probably won’t be surprised to learn that I’ve already researched that for you.

According to my arch nemesis, AI, we can’t come close to Germany’s 79-letter words; but we can match the Russians with our own 45-letter scientific term for a lung disease caused by inhaling very fine ash and silica dust: “pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.”

It would almost be worth getting the disease to hear your doctor try to tell you what it is that’s making it hard for you to breathe.

While all of this information is fairly useless in the ordinary course of our everyday lives, I did briefly wonder how one might work it into a question for the White House press corps to toss at Donald Trump one of these days . . . if for no other reason than to get a picture of his face as he struggles to decide whether he could possibly have heard the question correctly, or perhaps just had a minor stroke.

Or is that a little too diabolical, even for CNN’s indomitable Kaitlan Collins?

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
11/12/26