Cantrell Asher. - The Book of Word Records: A Look at Some of the Strangest, Shortest, Longest, and Overall Most Remarkable Words in the English Language

A Look at Some of the Strangest, Shortest, Longest, and Overall Most Remarkable Words in the English Language

For my grandfathers, Benjamin J. Lisle and C. Thomas Cantrell. I wouldnt have done this without your constant encouragement.

The greatest invention in human history is language. We didnt invent fire. Fire was already there, and we just figured out ways to control it. Sure, we came up with the wheel and tools and all of that stuff, and theyve served us well, but eventually we had to come up with a way to pass on the methods for making wheels and tools, and for less tangible things, like warnings of danger. Thats where language came in.

And, more than any other invention in our history, language has been the thing that makes us human. Being able to convey ideas and concepts to one another via simple, powerful sounds is how our culture survived, how our knowledge survived, and how we survived. Our strength is in our societies, and our societies grew strong because of words.

From language came writing, and from writing came the printing press, and from the printing press, we now have the Internet. Each iteration improves and reinforces our vast cultural knowledge, which, in turn, strengthens us as a society and, indeed, as a species. Homo sapiens have one thing no other animal before us has had: a network of information, millennia deep, that we keep encoded in our brains and express through voices and books. Every time you open your mouth, you are connected to your ancestors by a bond no other creature has.

As extraordinary as language is, though, we take it for granted. We tell our friends and family and coworkers the things they might want or need to know, ask questions about things we dont know, and create things that wed like other peoplestrangers, evento know. But how often do we truly celebrate language? How often do we say, Gosh, Im glad Im able to express myself clearly and easily through an established vocabulary and the standard rules of grammar

Thats what this book is about. Were looking at some of the biggest, the smallest, the longest, the shortest, and the weirdest things about our language. (Mostly English, since thats what youre reading right now.) Were parading around the great and strange things that weve done with nothing more than our minds and our words, because they deserve to be celebrated. If we cant spend all of our time marveling at the concept of language itself, the least we can do is commemorate the record-breaking uses of it.

All right, thats enough abject seriousness from all of us, your humble compilers of this tome you now hold. From here on, we promise to spice things up with the occasional, well-timed joke and what-have-you. Enjoy these mind-blowing words, phrases, books, albums, stories, puzzles, games, and whatever else we manage to find and toss in here. We promise only the best.

Computer security sucks; theres no doubt about that. Thats why businesses tend to pay people to take care of it for them. Unfortunately for us regular people, thats not really an option. You can try bugging your family member who knows about these things, but that only works a couple of times before they finally build an effigy of you and start sticking its head in their processor fan.

So its up to you to figure it out for yourself, and thats where things fall apart. The average person knows somewhere between jack and crap about computer security, and thats how weve ended up with a world full of people running out-of-date antivirus software (or none at all) and choosing awful passwords like the ones below.

(For the record, computer security experts say that the strongest passwords are actually phrases made up of random common words separated by spaces, like toaster mustache accent pistol, for example. They also happen to be much easier to remember than Ge-&930!xq, or whatever, which is totally not our office mainframe password. We hope.)

These passwords arent necessarily the most common passwords ever (since that tends to vary based on factors like the year, the age of the user, geographic location, etc.), but they are the ones that show up over and over in the databases of sites that get hacked. Whatever you do, dont set your password as

Apparently there are a lot of medieval fantasy fans roaming the Internet. Who knew? Theres nothing wrong with getting down with some Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, but at least try to pick something that isnt one of the two defining characteristics of the genre. Hell, even Shrek is about a guy (ogre) saving a princess (ogre) from a dragon (with a donkey fetish).

Ask any five-year-old to describe a standard fantasy story and count how long it takes for them to get to either princess or dragon. If youre a fantasy fan and a hacker knows it, thats how long itll take them to figure your password out. Therefore, by our logic, a five-year-old could hack your password.

Everyone does it. (Well, maybe not everyone, but a lot of people, anyway.) Also, everyones here because of it, which is gross to think about, so just ignore that part.

Point is, its on everybodys mind pretty often. Its not like ALF or Wham! or something. Its unlikely that youll ever hear, Hey, remember sex? Whatever happened to that?

But maybe you just think that highly of sex. Maybe its your favorite full-contact sport. But guess what? Its everybodys favorite full-contact sport. Its a rare bird indeed who says, Sex? Nah. Tried it, didnt like it.

If you really think this is a unique, original password, were wondering if your village elders know youve snuck a computer into the community, Jebediah.

Hey, so youre a sports fan? Thats great! All those teams and numbers and stuff should give you some great material for a password. And yet many people apparently dont bother in the slightest, and just go with the actual name of the sport they enjoy. Thats like loving ice cream and also choosing ice cream as your favorite flavor.

Seriously, pick your favorite team or player and one of their records or some stats or something, then mash them together, and theres a password thats at least marginally better than just baseball or football.

We dont know whats more disappointing: How terrible this password is, or the fact that they didnt say please. Talk about rude. Machines have feelings, too, according to Robocop, Terminator 2, and Battlestar Galactica.

But still, who comes up with something like this, besides Ali Baba? At least he and the forty thieves had a kind of clever password. (Open Sesame, open says-a-me. Get it? It took us way too long to figure out.) LetMeIn is just lazy and kind of jerkish. Itd be nice if computers locked these people out of their accounts solely out of spite.

We get it, monkeys are cute and everything, but password-worthy? In a world of things like kittens and puppies and whatever baby sloths are called? Well give you a minute to go search for baby sloth pictures on the Internet