 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Antidisestablishmentarianism! Major Keary |
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Gary Taig pleads in his article, Magic Spells
(PC Update July 91) for someone to tell him "What does it all mean ?". I am not sure if it is the plethora of prefixes and suffixes which adorn
antidisestablishmentarianism or the meaning of the word.
It occurs in Webster, which leads me to believe it is some American invention. In its day
antidisestablishmentarianism was reputed to be the longest word in the English language.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) does list antidisestablishmentarianism with commentary which suggests a deliberate attempt to create a long word. It derives from disestablish, a verb, which means: Undo establishment of deprive (Church) of State connexion, depose from official position. Its first recorded use was in 1593.
Disestablishment did not arrive until the 19th century.
The verb, disestablish, is turned into an adjective or noun by grafting -arian, which denotes or describes a sect or member of a sect, an age group (e.g.,
octogenarian), a doctrine (which is what our gargantuan word purports to denote), etc. People who oppose establishmentism (which appears in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary (SOD) should be called
antiestablishers, but disestablish has seniority by 500 years.
Disestablisharian just doesn't sound right. It has a slurred sound which might suggest the speaker is sloshed.
Disestablishist would be an appropriate noun form, but it has a slurred sound, too, as well as rhyming with a word which connotes
intoxication. So, disestablishmentarian got the nod. It was coined by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1900, referring to the Free Kirk in northern Scotland (a wily band of brigand
disestablishers).
A further addition, -ism turns the already bastard word into a noun which is supposed to mean: the postulation that church and state should be separated. That assumes the
-arian form was meant to be an adjective, which is not how the Archbishop used it. The -ism suffix differs from
-arian in that it denotes action. Manning the barricades, and that sort of thing.
So we have a word with a prefix (dis-) of Romanic origin, and three suffixes: one,
-arias, from Latin, one, -ment associated with words adopted from French, and the other,
-ism, from Greek. OED views the -ism form as a deliberate addition of three letters in order to achieve longest wool status.
A sect or movement with such a dastardly aim as disestablishment has to be resisted, so the further grafting of a prefix,
anti-, brings us full circle: one who opposes those who oppose a state church.
The Real Issue
What Gary describes is a very real problem. Spelling checkers get worse as they get better. A paradox? The more words which are included in a dictionary for automated spelling checks, the more chance there is of a serious error slipping through.
Even human proof readers miss pairs like discreet/discrete and causal/casual, which can be very serious in technical, scientific, or academic writing.
It is a good thing, from time to time, to fly warning signals about the danger of absolute reliance on spelling checkers. I find them good for picking up typos and my own failings, such as invariably spelling certain words incorrectly. However, beyond that it is essential for any discerning writer to examine copy visually.
Reprinted from the August 1991 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
