Antidisestablishmentarianism

ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM (acrostic) A lthough I’ve attempted some difficult and N eddlesome poems in my decades of writing, T he ultimate challenge had to be an acrostic I n which the longest English word was chosen. D eciding to undergo the absurd challenge I delved into the history of these useless words and S oon it became abundantly clear that E asily the most popular of the contenders, S hellacking Shakespeare’s ‘honorificabilitudintatibus’ and T aught to students from kindergarden to grade twelve, was A ntidisestablishmentarianism. B ut sadly, there were multisyllabic monsters even L onger, like the one we came to know and love I n Walt Disney’s 'Mary Poppins'- S upercalifragilisticexpialidocious- which H as fourteen syllables and a letter count of 34. M ost linguists agree that deciding on the longest word E ntails whether or not you allow chemical N ames like dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane T ypically referred to as DDT. A nother matter is the acceptability of lingo, R igmarole, jargon, balderdash, twaddle and I diomatic gibberish… A ntidisestablishmentarianism, N ot withstanding its pedantic appeal, I s clearly the lexiconic choice and S hould win the ‘Longest Word’ crown M ade from elbow patches and Donegal tweed. © 2009 James Rasmusson