Starting German   Having mentioned the importance to my language development of that "filtre" phrase in French, it strikes me that I could mention what I first learned in German, several years before.

Modern languages are my (and Bev's) field. Our doctorates are, after all, Doctors of Modern Languages. Studying dead languages has some validity, but to my mind, being able to speak to a conductor on an Italian train or oder dessert on a German ship beats anything you could do with a dead language. I'm glad only modern languages were offered in my high school, where I chose German (French was also offered at the time; Spanish came only later) because my friend, the one I later went to Europe with, knew some German.

Everyone can recall some teacher or teachers they had who made a difference, sometimes a minor one, sometimes a major one. I have two, one in high school, one in college.

The beginning German class I took was taught by Dr Walter Bernard. I felt uneasy going into that class. He had a reputation for being tough. You'd better not whisper a word in his class. But what a cream puff. And I hung on his every word. These were still the years when the dead-language tradition of starting to study the written form first was still dragging down modern languages. Yet Bernard, the first day of class, started us out orally. He was ahead of his time. He pointed around the room and had us memorize, totally in oral form: Dort ist die Decke. Dort ist die Lampe. Dort ist die Wand. Dort ist die Uhr. Dort ist die Tafel....

The first one is: "That's the ceiling", so that's the very first thing I ever learned in German. The others sentences go on similarly. I remember only those first five, although the list was longer. I now see how clever he was to make it easier by using only words that needed the feminine "die", and not "der" or "das".

At my school, we changed courses in mid-year, so three years of German came to six semesters and covered courses German 1-6. Let me tell you how I managed to pull a fast one. All the guys (at the time Brooklyn Tech was all-boys; now it's co-ed) were pleased with the disciplined study we got from Dr Bernard in German 1. But then we moved on to other teachers in the department and there was a marked decline. I couldn't stand how those others made it so boring. It reached the point where discipline declined in the class. I didn't like it, not one bit. This was too important to me.

The last semester was German 6. We hadn't had Dr Bernard since the beginning, and he wasn't scheduled for 6, either. I sent around a petition asking for Bernard the following semester, and all the guys signed it very willingly. I dropped it in the department chairman's mailbox. Some teachers weren't too happy about it, but we ended high school on a high note with Dr Bernard teaching German 6. Things were on a roll.

So "Dort ist die Decke" got me where I am today, and it also led me to Beverly. Here's how. In Queens College, I languished in the German Department. It was not sufficient language instruction and all literature instruction. I was not doing well the first couple of years. The teachers were all very nice, but I remember particularly Dr Harold Lenz. He was a lot of fun. One semester, he was my advisor, and we were discussing that I just didn't have enough language background to take on all this literature. I needed to practice just talking with people and reviewing fundamentals.

Then Dr Lenz, as my advisor, turned to me and said: "There's a very good summer German School at Middlebury College in Vermont...."

Sesquipedelia   This is a quite useless, but fun, word that I’ll use to introduce a few more useless words. Most of them are favorites of mine.

We've got all sorts of numerical prefixes. Using geometric figures as an example, we can work down from an octagon, septagon, hexagon, pentagon. When we hit 4 we don't get "quadragon", which would have been a fun word. Instead we talk about angles in "quadrangle" or sides in "quadrilateral".

3 is also problematic. We do have "trigon", but no one uses it. We put the prefix on "angle" (as in quadrangle) and get "triangle". That's all well and good, but if we're not going to use "trigon", why is the study of three-sided forms called TRIGON-o-metry and not TRIANGLE-o-metry?

We've run out of geometric figures, so to represent 2 we have "bimonthly" or "dialog", and for 1 we have "monolog". But it gets interesting when we get into prefixes showing halves.

To show one-half, we have a confusing situation in English. There are three variations of the same word. Probably the most frequent is semi-, so let's call that basic, as in semi-annual. But if, in mythology, you want to talk about a less important god (half-god), it does not appear as semi-god, it appears as demi-god, and there's nothing you can do about it. Then, when you split the globe into two spheres, you get neither a semi-sphere nor a demi-sphere; it's a hemi-sphere. So we have three variations, and you have to know which one goes on whatever word it is that you want to "cut in half".

But it gets better. It seems that, in British musicology, they have special words for different kinds of notes. I don't know what they all are, but I do know that an eighth note can be called a quaver. Now watch what happens based on this.

A sixteenth note is a .................... semiquaver.
A thirty-second note is a .............. demisemiquaver.
A sixty-fourth note is a ................. hemidemisemiquaver.

Now try to work those words into a conversation.

Few people will believe that we have a prefix meaning one-and-one-half, but we do. I learned it when Bev and I used to collect stamps (inherited from her; later thankfully sold). We know the US Centennial was in 1876 and the Bicentennial was in 1976, yet stamp collectors will see the US stamps issued in 1926 for the US Sesquicentennial, when the country was 1 1/2 centuries old.

Now to say this prefix is useless is an understatement. Don't try to say in a recipe to use a sesqui-teaspoon of sugar, any more than you'd say to use a semi-tablespoon of flour.

But I do know one more delicious word that uses this prefix: sesquipedelian. Look inside the word for ped- (or even pedel-). You know that's a foot, as in pedestrian or pedal. So we're talking about 1 1/2 feet. Now don't think in terms of a horrible automobile accident. We're talking about measurements here. "Sesquipedelian" refers to words that are 1 1/2 feet long.

Now lighten up! The word is real, but it's a JOKE word!! It's an exaggeration. If you say that some blowhard politician has a sesquipedelian vocabulary, it means he likes to use long words. And the most fun of all is that "sesquipedelian" is ITSELF a sesquipedelian word!

Based on this word, I've made up a variation, as used above, sesquipedelia, referring to a collection of long (and often useless) words, a few of which follow.

Antipodes   (an-TIP-o-deez) I love this one, since it also involves geography. The antipodes is the point on the earth opposite a given point. Put your finger on a globe, reach around and touch the other side, and you've got the antipodes. However, it's usually used vaguely to mean far, far away, such as "they were off sailing somewhere in the antipodes".

I prefer the literal sense, because it's more interesting, but also because of what the word literally means. anti- means against/opposite; pod- (or maybe podes) means foot (think of a podiatrist). So the antipodes is the ANTIFOOT!! Stand on one foot like a flamingo, and picture a single imaginary foot pressing down/up towards you on the opposite side of the globe. I think you could also scare little children telling them that the Antifoot is going to get them.

The old joke is that if you dig a hole straight down deep enough, you'll come up in China. Nonsense. Look at a globe. The antipodes of China is somewhere in Africa. The antipodes of the eastern US is in the ocean west of Australia; the antipodes of western Europe is in the ocean east of Australia. That means the antipodes of all of Australia is the entire North Atlantic.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious   This is always a favorite of kids. It's just a meaningless nonsense word, like fiddle-dee-dee, but if nonsense words are always recognizable as such by most speakers of the language, then they attain a degree of nonsensical validity.

Antidisestablishmentarianism   Now this one's a lot of fun. It is absolutely valid, yet it can be played around with a lot, changing its length, and varying its meaning. It's a delightful word showing the almost infinite flexibility of language.

All you've got to realize that it's based on establish, and what's being referred to is having an established church, such as the Lutheran Church or the Catholic Church, or by extension, Islam, as an official government church. It's a delight to watch the flexibility of prefixes and suffixes altering the meaning.

Having an established church makes it part of the establishment.

However, a liberal may want to disestablish it, that is, want the disestablishment of the church. He would be a disestablishmentarian and what he believes in would be disestablishmentarianism.

A conservative may fight back to retain the status quo. He would fight for the antidisestablishment of the church. He would be an antidisestablishmentarian and what he believes in is antidisestablishmentarianism. (There we have the classic form of the word.)

You could fool around with it some more. You could argue that if a church is establishable in the first place, it should also be disestablishable. Do you feel disestablishmentarianish today or antidisestablishmentarianish? Are you proestablishment or prodisestablishment?

How could these words be used? Well, remember that Kemal Atatürk secularized Turkey in the 1920's. By removing Islam from government sponsorship he was a disestablishmentarian, believing in disestablishmentarianism. You could assume that most Muslim clerics were, and probably still are, antidisestablishmentarians, believing in antidisestablishmentarianism.

In any case, LOVERS OF SESQUIPEDELIA, UNITE!!!