TriumphAnt

There has been a wave of discussion recently, both in and out of cyberspace, over the news that the mighty Google, search engine extraordinaire, has announced it will be making an IPO – Initial Public Offering – thus making it possible for an ordinary guy, presumably one with money to burn, to buy a little piece of the company via purchases of shares of its stock.

(Gee whillikers! I haven’t been this excited since I read long ago that pop sensation Madonna was going public with a line of clothing. Of course, at the time it was because I just loved the thought of having in my portfolio a share or two, complete with frameable stock certificates, of companies named “Boytoy” and “Slutco”. But I digress.)

Although Google as a force is still really in its nascent stages – the company only exploded onto the scene a mere five years ago – the sheer scope of its global impact today was driven home to me in a very recent exchange with one Jeff Miller, a man who maintains a website devoted to word oddities and trivia.

One of his sections is devoted to long words, and I noticed that he had included a classic. But I also noted he was missing a quirky related fact about it that long ago had struck me as an oddity of the genre. Here’s the brief message I sent him:

“You might consider adding, on your ‘Long words’ page under ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’ entry, that ‘interdenominationalistically’ has precisely the same number of letters (28). In our family at least, they are both equally well-known.”

In very short order – less than a day in fact – I received this message in reply:

”This word is under consideration. However, a google search gives exactly 3 hits, all on pages discussing long words. This seems to suggest perhaps that the word is not well known outside of your family! Thanks for the tip. Jeff Miller”

I read that with a mixture of both disappointment and dismay. Disappointment because our little family oddity, which my daughter cites with delight on those occasions where wordplay is the subject of conversation, was essentially dismissed with a cyber-sniff, and dismay because it suggested to me that someone with so thorough a collection of word oddities should be so limited in his authority citation. A three-hit google reference was all he needed to conclude that the word is “not well-known outside of your family.”

Well of course it’s not! That’s (a) why it’s an oddity, and (b) why I thought you’d be interested in it.

How many hits, I wonder, would have been returned had he searched “name”, the bare-bones root word of “interdenominationalistically”? (I’ll save you the trouble – 279 million on 30 April 2004). Would 279 million returns justify a mention, Mr. Miller? (Probably not, because at that volume, it’s hardly an oddity, is it?)

But the simple fact is, it’s a word.

On its path to being, it begins in English with “name”, and even earlier among its stout Old English roots as “nama”, “nomen” in Latin and “onoma” in Greek. It travels structurally and historically through verbs forms like “nominate” and “denominate”, their nouns “nomination” and “denomination”, detouring as it goes along sidings where are parked trains of adjectives like “nominal” and “denominational” and their adverb tenders “nominally” and “denominationally”. A hike along a connecting “national” trail will lead you to a “nationalist” who might bore you to death he is so “nationalistic”.

And so on, and so on.

My point is that the word “interdenominationalistically” is crafted from legitimate rules of English grammar and spelling. Yet ersatz wordsmith Mr. Miller tells me it’s merely “under consideration” because it is not common – witness, he cites, the meagre Google return. But in the context of his site’s breathless pronouncement that Here There Be Word Oddities, I say, “so what?”

Mr. Miller’s reply disappoints me because he makes it appear that his research begins and ends with Google. In our house, we have literally dozens of paper dictionaries. The massive “Oxford Compact”, its type so tiny that it must be read with a magnifying glass, is still the most revered. But we also have dictionaries of Canadian English, American English, dictionaries of slang, dictionaries of the origins of English names, foreign language-to-English dictionaries and their reverses, crossword puzzle dictionaries, spelling dictionaries, dictionaries of synonyms, picture dictionaries that name the several distinct parts of a paper clip, even a Scrabble dictionary that doesn’t bother with time-wasting trivia like the meaning of a word; its purpose is simply to tell you the word exists and you can seize that triple-word score with your u-less “q”. In fact, I have a book about the writing of the Oxford dictionary (It has spawned a sequel. Movie rights are probably in the works) and another book about the passion some people have always had for building libraries – the book collections, not the buildings per se.

And “dictionaries” is correct. Because in our house no one dictionary ever completely answers our “What’s this mean?” requirement.

I am not condemning either Mr. Miller or the use of online resources. In fact, I often widen my dictionary prowling by using a superb online resource called the Librarians’ Index to the Internet (LII) that has whole subsets of dictionaries available to the computer user that would simply bankrupt a homeowner and collapse your bookshelf were you to set out to acquire paper versions of LII’s vast array of reference links.

But were I in Mr. Miller’s place, I would be delighted to discover such a minuscule Google return – here indeed is one more bit of evidence to confirm the word’s rareness.

But I probably won’t be going to Mr. Miller’s place any more. He’s way too myopic for my purposes. I am a word miner, and I am often rewarded by the unearthing of a genuine “gee whiz” nugget that keeps me in love with the English language and its limitless configurations. For me, discovery and affirmation are often simultaneous – “I didn’t know that was a word!”

Mr. Miller, alas, is a data miner, a statistician. Despite his site’s name, his reply suggests he weights a word’s “oddity” not by its rarity, but rather by its googlability. (And if that’s not already a word, wait, because it will be.)

In a wordsmith, and as a wordsmith, I find that to be an oddity.