Heh. Lynn is talking about the alleged "next big thing" after Twitter - something called "flutter". (And a commenter on the site she links to proposed "Bitter," where you can only post a 0 or a 1).

(Incidentally the site linked to - the video is pretty hilarious commentary on the "faster bigger newer" mentality. I was reading somewhere the other day about how people are complaining about stuff that "never even existed" 20 minutes ago. That's kind of like people complaining that a Tweet takes "too long to read.")

And I realized just one of the reasons (other than my self-conscious, "I'm not one of the cool kids and don't want to be" pose) I don't Twitter (or is that Tweet) is that I cannot constrain myself to 140 characters.

And I almost said, "Heck, I can't use WORDS of 140 letters or less." And then I thought, no, that's not true. Well, maybe it would be if I were a biochemist. The longest word (technically speaking) is 1,913 letters long. It's a protein name*.

(And I HAVE a copy of that "Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary" somewhere. I bought it years and years ago - I remember bringing it to school in 5th grade so my friends and I could snicker over some of the words using "procto-" and "copra-" as a root. And there were a few words in there the definition of which I would not understand fully until I was in college [and then I will admit I was moderately horrified when I figured out what they REALLY meant]).

(*Wikipedia - which I don't think one can always believe, even on matters of trivia - claims there is one even longer ("Not to be confused with Tintin" has to be one of the odder disclaimers I've run across)

There's also "antidisestablishmentarianism" (though Mrs. Byrnes, as I remember, also lists "ultraantidisestablishmentarianism") at 28 and 33 characters respectively.

And the wonderful word floccinaucinihilipilification (clocking in at 29 characters), which apparently means "estimating as nothing" and which was playfully coined from some Latin roots that were apparently lying around.

And Shakespeare used honorificabilitudinitatibus (27), the state of being able to achieve honor.

So I'm a little sad to see that there are, apparently, no existing words of exactly 140 characters. But there are a couple of long words that perhaps deserve greater usage, if only for comic effect.

I suppose if I spoke German (or one of the Scandinavian languages) where those portmanteau nouns are more permitted, perhaps I'd be faster to think of some really, really long words.