by Charles Memminger
Friday, November 22, 1996
AH, the power of being a columnist. Raw power. Dave Masunaga of Iolani School's Department of Mathematics didn't have a chance. He played right into my hands. Is it a mistake if you
did it on purpose?In a recent column I published the longest word in the English language, all 1,900 letters of it. It was a type of protein. Because of its spelling complexity, it is referred to in the regular world as a "hairy protein."
For the non-intelligentsia, I buried the word "Waldo" deep within the forest of incomprehensible letters. I figured, it is my duty to serve both those with large brains and those with a certain amount of leg room in their cranial cavities. I often have to write a column that operates on several different levels. For some, it is a simple word game, like a verbal edition of "Where's Waldo?" For others, like Mr. Math Masunaga, it becomes an intellectual challenge.
See, I knew there would be someone like Masunaga out there who would pore over every 1,900-plus letter of the word seeking mistakes. And I knew that person would write me a letter declaring victory. And I knew I would then easily get two columns out of one idea. After all, running the longest word in the English language was a pretty nifty way to fill space. Getting TWO columns out of the same lame idea is, well, brilliant. It's just too easy, you know?
Not to take anything away from Mr. Masunaga, but any regular reader would know that the chances of me spelling the longest word in the English language correctly are about the same as me winning the lottery and then donating the money to the National Institute of Orthography. (Those with Big Brains already know what orthography means. Those with Medium Brains can go look it up. The rest of you should try to see how many three-letter words you can make out of orthography: i.e. hay, hog, hat, etc.)
AnYone who has seen me regularly tangle with such brain-teasers as effect/affect, it's/its or theirs/there's would be absolutely unamazed that I might misspell the longest word in the English language. (My favorite spelling rule is: "I before E except on Monday mornings or when serious hangovers are involved.")
The thing is, I merely copied the long word from a book. According to professor Masunaga, I was lazy for not recognizing at least six errors in the text. Frankly, I can live with that. If you apply the Baseball Rules of Statistics to spelling errors, I was batting well over .950 with this one word.
"I know I'm appearing to be really obnoxious here, but I really don't mean to," Masunaga wrote. "I just would think that a newspaper columnist would ask someone about the accuracy of a topic, especially if it were a topic in which he were not well versed."
The problem, of course, is that columnists are not well-versed in most of what they write about. If they were to check the accuracy of a certain topic ... well, Mr. Masunaga, ignorance is the scientific foundation of just about all column-writing.
But the longest-word column did give the professor's students hours of fun poring over sections of the word -like glutamyl, glycyl and isoleucyl -and finding errors.
"The reason why the errors are so obviously glaring is the fact that, if you remember from high school biology, there are only 20 amino acids which could make up this protein," he wrote.
Remember the number of amino acids? Why, here in the plush offices of Honolulu Lite, we speak of little else!
For those of you who kept a copy of the longest-word column (even I can't get away with running the whole thing twice), Masunaga suggests this word fun: try to find out WHICH of the 20 amino acids is missing. Terrific!
If that seems a little too complicated for most of you, just go back and see if you can find Waldo again.
