We often have interesting discussions in a book club that I attend weekly. We have been meeting for several years, so we know each other pretty well, but still, occasionally, things that are said by other members of the group surprise me. I was surprised recently by one member who stated that she thought that we went through the books too quickly. She would prefer to take more time and discuss the nuances and details more. She said that we often go too fast for her to understand all of what is read. The surprising thing to me is that I would have said the opposite. The group has been known to go through books one chapter at a time. A book with a lot of chapters can take months. As one who reads a lot of books, the slow pace of the reading tends to leave me distracted. I don’t see the book as a whole if I only read a few pages each week. I’d rather read the book, have a couple of times to discuss that book and then go on to the next book. I don’t need to dissect the book or to be told what it means. I like to see books in the context of other books and compare and contrast the perspectives of the authors.

This particular book club is composed of professionals. Most members of the group are ordained ministers. I think that all of the members of the group have at least one graduate degree. We ought to be able of graduate reading and should be capable of taking responsibility for understanding what we have read. It is a rare book that we would want to take more than a month to discuss, in my opinion.

But not all of the members of the group see things my way.

I think that I am a bit of a snob when it comes to education. I don’t apologize for having invested 8 years of my life in undergraduate and graduate school. I know that academic learning is only one kind of learning and that those of us who have had the opportunity to get an education are not somehow better or smarter than others. But I also know that we have had the opportunity to hone skills like reading and processing information, writing and expressing our ideas and opinions. I like to think that education helps to increase our skills at critical thinking.

Maybe it just teaches us jargon.

I like knowing a bit of jargon. I like knowing a few big words. I enjoy using them from time to time.

But those of us who speak English don’t really have the corner on long words. German is a great language for compound words. Recently, the German language lost a remarkably long word when it was dropped from the lexicon. Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz is a compound word that was introduced in 1999 in the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. It means “law delegating beef label monitoring.” But the European Union recently changed the laws governing the testing of cattle and the result is that the word is no longer necessary. I never did learn how to pronounce it. German is a difficult language for me to speak.

In all fairness, the word never did appear in a dictionary, only in government documents. The longest word to be found in the dictionary is kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung, meaning “automobile liability insurance,” although the Guiness World Records book records lists Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften, meaning “insurance firms providing legal protection.” I’m hoping that some dictionary somewhere will pick up donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitaenswitwe, meaning “widow of a Danube steamboat company captain.” It has a certain flair, don’t you think?

German speakers, however, don’t have the corner on long words. The Oxford English Dictionary’s longest word is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, which refers to a lung disease caused by inhaling silica dust. The OED does go on to say, however, that the word was “invented [by the] president of the National Puzzler’s League in imitation of polysyllabic medical terms” and tends to be used only as an example of a very long word.

The OED does have some very useful words that I try to work into my conversation from time to time. We all know the Mary Poppins word, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. And you have to admit that it is just more fun to say honorificabilitudinity than honorableness.

To my knowledge the longest place name on the planet is the Welsh village Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. It is pronounced Lien-vire-pooli-guin-gill-go-ger-u-queern-drob-ooil-liandus-lifo-gogo-gouch, I believe.

Now if the books that our group read contained these words, it would take a bit longer to read them. Even looking up a very long word in the dictionary is a bit of a challenge, because it is simply easier to make a spelling mistake with a very long word than it is with one that is a bit shorter.

But then, I like keeping the dictionary handy when I am reading. In fact, through the wonders of inheritance, I now have an unabridged Webster’s in my basement library and an unabridged American Heritage Dictionary upstairs for comparison. It is always good to have a dictionary at the dining table just incase a disagreement about a word or a question about origins arises during the dinnertime conversation. Having grown up in a home where the dictionary was always close at hand, I didn’t know that there was anything strange about this practice until our children started making friends and occasionally sharing a meal at the home of one of their friends and reporting that “they don’t keep a dictionary on the table.” Sigh . . .

Words are simply fun. And it doesn’t take an advanced degree to enjoy them. And I guess it really doesn’t matter how many words you read in a given week. I’m even open to taking a bit longer to discuss the books our group reads. It isn’t as if that is the only book that I read. If I don’t have two or three books going at the same time, I begin to get nervous and start looking for the next books I’m going to read. At this point it doesn’t look like I will run out of things to read in this lifetime.

Personally, sometimes I just enjoy being magniloquent.

Now, don’t you wish you had a dictionary close at hand?

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