Sesquipedalian

A sesquipedalian is a big word. The name literally means "a foot and a half in length."

What is interesting about the term "sesquipedalian" is that "a foot and a half" is a measure of physical length. Only the written word has physical length. You can put down a ruler and measure how much space a word takes up on the page. In fact, some college students agonize over such things when trying to meet a page limit.

The spoken word has temporal length - the amount of time it takes to say it. Often, temporal length and physical length correspond, but not always. For instance, the word "I" and the word "flight" both have only one syllable, so they should take about the same about of time to say. But "flight" has five more letters than "I" and takes up almost five times as much space.

The use of "big words" is often thought of as overly formal or even pretentious. What do people have against "big words"? I don't think it is their size that actually offends, but rather the fact that they aren't frequently used and not everyone knows what they mean. The words are referred to as "big" because most of them are that, too.

What is the connection between the length of a word and how widely it is used and understood? At this point, I'm not entirely sure. I know that in the English language the majority of words that are commonly used are Germanic in origin, and a lot of the words that people think of as "big" come from Latin. Because Latin is an inflected language, words don't have to start out big to end up big. And to make matters worse, sometimes the words just sort of expand as they are making their way into English. For example, the Latin word "pulcher" is an adjective meaning "beautiful." But on it's way into English it has been turned into a noun, "pulchritude," (meaning "beauty") and then back into an adjective to give us "pulchritudinous" (meaning "beautiful.") That's twice as many letters to say the same thing (and it takes almost twice as long to say).

So far we know that "big words" are words that a lot of people don't know the meaning of and many of them also happen to be long. We know that the length of a written word is not exactly the same as the length of a spoken word (in quality and sometimes quantity). Does speaking a "big word" aloud shed any light on its meaning?

I'll tell you this: When I am reading and come across a long word I don't know, I tend to skip over it. My brain says "does not compute" and doesn't waste any time on it. But if I am talking to someone and she uses a long word I've never heard before, even if I don't understand it, I may at least enjoy the way it sounds.

Tickets To Where?

England is bursting with examples of how the spoken word and the written word evolve at a different pace.

One of the main and obvious differences between the spoken word and the written word is permanence. This will come up often as we discuss sound and sense, because believe it or not, the ephemeral nature of the spoken word can be a very good thing. If you have ever had a teacher collect a note you were passing in class, you may know what I mean.

As a word is used, the way that people pronounce it changes. Maybe it is hard to say, so they slur it into something easier. Maybe the change is based on a mixing of cultures causing a change of accent. You will recall that in many of the world's languages, the written word is meant to reflect the pronunciation of the spoken word. So, does spelling really change with pronunciation?

Since I am currently living in Norwich (which rhymes with porridge) I can definitively state that the written word is not keeping up. Other examples of deceptively spelled place names in England include: Wymondham (pronounced 'win-dom'), Leicester (pronounced 'les-ter'), and Grosvenor (pronounced 'grove-ner').

Spelling is standardized. We have dictionaries telling us exactly how words are spelled, and there is only one right way to do it. It is one thing for a group of people to subtly pronounce a word differently, until over time, they've left out an entire syllable. It is something else to take a word everyone agrees on the spelling of and start leaving letters out of it. So eventually, the spoken and written word pull apart until they hardly resemble one another at all. And since the written word was based on the spoken word in the first place, its connection with meaning becomes tenuous. When an American tourist asks for train tickets to 'Why-mond-ham' the British rail worker doesn't know where he wants to go.