Sticking It To The Oxford English Dictionary

Very often, when it's a slow day in the office, workers tend to run down the same mundane to-do list:

1. Check CNN.com for Breaking News
2. Check GMail
3. Instant message co-worker asking if they have any snacks
4. Check CNN.com for Breaking News, end up reading about Gilmore Girls
5. Get some water
6. Submit hours
7. Play with staple remover
8. Read Wall Street Journal Online
9. Doodle
10. Get some water
11. Check Slate.com, read Explainer article about 4-hour+ erections
12. CNN.com
13. Debate international politics with Pakistani co-worker
14. Get some water
15. Go to the bathroom and ask yourself why've you drank so much water today
16. CNN.com

OR

You could do what I did and set a new world record. My first choice for a world record was already snagged up by this guy, so I decided to collaborate with a co-worker to develop the longest word in the English language. To our knowledge (an 8 combined years of Ivy League educations), the two longest English words in existence were:

• Floccinaucinihilipilification (29 letters) and
• Antidisestablishmentarianism (28 letters)

Obviously, our goal was to crack 30 letters. After a surprisingly short amount of time -- oh, 15 minutes -- we hit the 31 letter mark:

Hyperglycemisesquipedaliaphobic

If one were so inclined, one could simply extract the various prefixes and suffixes to get a general sense of this incredible word's meaning. Since I can only assume that you have more to do than just read this crap all day, I'll happily provide the official defintion:

Hyperglycemisesquipedaliaphobic: Someone suffering from
Hyperglycemisesquipedaliaphobia

And I think we all know what that means!

Okay fine, we actually came up with two words, and the official creation is actually:

Hyperglycemisesquipedaliaphobia: The fear of over-using multisyllabic words as a result of a high blood-to-sugar ratio.

Someone get me a flight suit, because it's "Mission Accomplished"!

Or so we thought. As it happens, Oxford Dictionaries is quick to point out that "most of the words which are given as 'the longest word' are merely inventions, and when they occur it is almost always as examples of long words, rather than as genuine examples of use." Well, Oxford, put this in your loquacious pipe and conflagrate it:

Chris, a life-long victim of hyperglycemisesquipedaliaphobia, was meticulous in destroying all of his brother's dictionaries and thesauruses before sitting down for his ice cream sundae. "Gosh," Chris exclaimed, "I sure do like hot fudge!"

I expect a call from the OED any day now.