Big silly words you'll never see again

The longest word in the English language is something I had a very brief look into a around a month ago.

I was watching one of E4's landfill “100 best” shows, this one on musicals, and a writer of a certain piece of saccharine fucking nonsense laid claim that a word in this song took the place of the longest word in English. This annoyed me.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is a stupid, piece of coined non-sense and even as I write this has a big wavy red line underneath it – even still it does appear in many a dictionary. Thankfully it does so as a proper noun. This means that many would not consider it a contender for longest word.

This in turn asks the questions, what definition do we use for a 'word' and how should length be compared.

Chemical names are usually stupidly long. Where do we draw the limits on coinage and construction?

Well, I'm not going to get bogged down in all that shit and instead I'm just going to list the longest words – from those coined to those of chemical names.

The first one is what many might consider the true longest word in the English language as it is a non-coined, non-technical word – Antidisestablishmentarianism. (28 letters)

It's a constructed word which I'm too lazy to break down now but give it some thought and you can do it by yourself, it's quite easy really. Just start at establish.
Anyway, the word itself means “the movement or ideology that opposes disestablishment”.

And really, you could expand on the word further and have antidisestablishmentarianisticalized and you can continue the fun by adding prefixes to that...

The next word, while still non-technical, is coined. Floccinaucinihilipilification (29 letters) - "the action or habit of estimating as worthless".

I don't what to talk about this word any more because I hate it. It's something I can see Will Self using to belittle me because he's so fucking smart and so smug light fucking bends around him.

In a reverse of the above, non-coined but technical, Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism (30 letters) is next in-line. It's normally written as pseudoPHP.
In short it's an inherited disorder similar to Pseudohypoparathyroidism. A medical condition.

Now, to combine the above two, we have the next longest word, a technical and coined word, Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (45 letters).

It was coined in 1935 by Everett M. Smith purley to be the longest word ever to appear in a dictionary and to this date it is. It's own definition reads "a fictitious word alleged to mean 'a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust, causing inflammation in the lungs.'"

There's then a huge word, 183 letters long, coined by some Greek called Aristophanes in his comedy “Assemblywomen”. It was written around 390BC...

Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhy-
potrimmatosilphioparaomelitokatakechymenokichl-
epikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephall-iokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon.

Fucking non-sense.

Apparently it means a dish made up of all different dishes. God, I'm pissing my self with laughter. That must have been one hell of read back in the day.

Then finally, the longest, most stupid word in English, clocking in at a stupid 189, 819 letters, of which I will not be writing here, or even copy and paste here, is a protein called Titin or conectin.

It's the largest known protein and because of this, if you use the names of each amino acid found within, you get this big stupid word. Kinda like calling a sponge cake by all it's ingredients stuck together.

If an organic chemist wants to tell me that's a poor comparison, please do.

A short version of it missing the middle, a lot of the middle, looks like this - Methionylthreonylthreonyl...isoleucine.

And that's your boring lot.

Every time I set out a topic to write about I plan to draft and redraft and I never end up doing that. The above was all written in one go in a twenty minute session so sorry if it's a mess.

Correlation and the cause

A month long hiatus was never my plan but over that time I've had exams and assignments to concentrate on, unfortunately. So with those commitments over my head I couldn't find time to do adequate research for any posts. Yes, I do research for each post...all two of them. I couldn't find time for a lot of things in fact.

It seems I simply started the blog a bit too early. Now, though, I have a lot of free time ahead of me so I should be able to get a post out at least once a week. With pictures and links and other improvements. How exciting, eh?

Anyway, to get back into the swings of things I'll post a short little entry on an important aspect of the scientiftic method – the fact that correlation does not imply causation.

Simply put, this is a phrase used in science and statistics to emphasize that just because there's a correlation between two variables, this is not proof that one is the cause of the other. An idea that's simple enough to grasp but you'd be surprised how often people can be fooled and overreact when shown a correlation and told it's the cause. An asshole called Dr. Wakefield used a certain correlation to imply that a Autism was caused by the MMR vaccine. I'll go into that a little at the end.

But before I do, I'll just outline a couple of examples where if you were to use the logical fallacy - “correlation does imply causation” - how you'd look like an idiot.

During either the Korean War or the Vietnam War, I can remember which, in one base there had been an insane amount of crashes involving soldiers on motorbikes. The army conducted a study to see if they could find a reason, a commonality between all these soldiers and why they were crashing their motorcycles.

The results of the studies... Tattoos. The single thing all people involved in these accidents had in common was tattoos. The idea that it was the tattoos causing the crashes was ridiculous. It could be argued that people who get tattoos are more likely to ride motorcycles and take chances. And people that are more likely to ride motorcycles and take risks are more likely to crash motorcycles. But to say a tattoo is the cause. You'd be a fucking retard.

In a widely-studied example, numerous epidemiological studies showed that women who were taking combined hormone replacement therapy (HRT) also had a lower-than-average incidence of coronary heart disease (CHD), leading doctors to propose that HRT was protective against CHD. But controlled trials showed that HRT caused a small and significant increase in risk of CHD. Re-analysis of the data showed that women undertaking HRT were more likely to be from higher socio-economic groups, with better than average diet and exercise regimes. The two were coincident effects of a common cause, rather than cause and effect as had been supposed.

Thanks to wikipedia for that example.

Now, to talk about Wakefield who conducted a study on the links between the MMR jab and Autism. When his reports were released in 1998 implying that the jab was in fact a cause of autism people went bat shit retarded and refused to give their children the MMR vaccine. A truly stupid decision that borders on child abuse and I say that with minimum hyperbole.

The findings are now widely believed to have no credible scientific basis at all but we still have people who refuse to give children the MMR vaccine. You can read more about the whole controversy here.

Thing is, if you approach cunt Wakefield's findings using the scientific method (read common sense), it falls apart pretty quickly.

The use of the jab while Wakefield was doing his research was widespread – the odds that the autistic children that Wakefield was using for his study had got the shot were huge. This doesn't mean the shot was the cause. There would have been a load of other commonalities between these children that meant just as little.

People seem to refuse to think a lot of the time.