D. Murali

THE `longest real word' in the English language is said to be floccinaucinihilipilification, with 29 letters. "Defined as the act of estimating (something) as worthless, its usage has been recorded as far back as 1741," educates Wikipedia. There are other words such as antidisestablishmentarianism and pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis listed on http://en.wikipedia.org, not counting James Joyce's 100 plus letter words in Finnegans Wake, and the 2,07,000+ letters long name for human mitochondrial DNA.

But Craig Conley looks at the opposite, the shortest words, in One Letter Words: A Dictionary, from Harper Collins (www.harpercollins.com) . "Get back to the basics. Put your trust in the ABCs," exhorts the author to those who find that `words get in the way' just when they want to say something.

With 26 letters, you can convey about a thousand thoughts, he guides, from A to Z. Intriguing it may seem, but the individual letters of the alphabet can shape "the topography of a mental landscape that had been there all along."

The book is the first work of such a nature since the sixteenth century, says Conley. It seems the earlier one was Ekakkharakosa by Saddhammakitti, a Buddhist lexicographer who compiled one letter Pali words. Conley had put his book online at blueray.com, and dedicated it to the White Queen of Through the Looking Glass. For, Lewis Carroll has her say, "And I'll tell you a secret - I can read words of one letter! Isn't that grand!"

With A, therefore, we begin at the beginning, as in Alice in Wonderland, and find 52 definitions for the letter, including: `the title of a 10-minute short film from Germany,' blood type, vitamin, brassiere cup size, and `the field and state of working consciousness' as in AUM!

Know that an A-shirt is a T-shirt without sleeves, and that A shoe-width is wider than AA, and narrower than B. Strangely, A had started off as a consonant in ancient Egypt, explains Conley, deciphering the hieroglyphics where "the eagle simply represented the A sound."

In the B section, catch up with this quote of the Bard from Love's Labour's Lost: "Fair as a text B in a copy-book." Victor Hugo too finds mention for "B is the back on the back, the hump," and Joyce rejoices equally in short words when writing "B is parkgate" in Ulysses. "In the Middle Ages, a B was branded on a blasphemer's forehead." And in astronomy, B is "a class of blue-white stars." In SMS, though, B is `be', so that Hamlet's dilemma becomes 2b-r-n8-2b!

You don't have to see C to remember that it is a high-level programming language after B, but there was no A to precede it. Food provided to soldiers during combat is called C-ration, and there is enough of C in music. C, which also means a Roman numeral for 100 and carbon, is `described as an infuriating letter' because it is "unusually filled with ambiguities and complexities."

In D, come entries that speak of `the saloon deck of the Titanic,' `a trotting pattern for horse training', and `D-Day'. D layer is the lowest part of the ionosphere; and painfully, D was the brand of `a Civil War deserter' - one-and-a-half inches high, as per regulations, "either be burned with a hot iron or cut with a razor." Eeek!

To give the big E means to brush off or ignore, explains the dictionary. E for electronic, as in e-mail; and for excellent, as a school grade. It is also "the heaviest weight of sandpaper available," and "the most commonly occurring of all letters."

What a long journey it has been, though I'm only on page 48 and there are 21 letters more!

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