When I was teaching classes in school, we played word games. We looked for the longest word in the dictionary, and found it.

Antidisestablishmentarianism.

We wrote it down and counted the letters. 28.

For years that was proclaimed as the winner, and everybody knew it.

I talked about the conservative nature of dictionaries. They are always behind the times (like political parties), slow to recognize current common speech. Every year, they add new words they discover or hear uttered concurrently, mostly used by the young in the new next generation.

The nature of our own language, English, allows us to portmanteau words, and add prefixes and suffixes almost endlessly.

The Germans use language similarly, making impossibly long words that go beyond the margins and save the best for last. The Irish, in love with language, write sentences so long they go on forever, for pages and pages and pages (Thank you, Joyce).

So my students and I played the game of putting words together to come up with longer and longer examples and break the record.

I would write a basic core word, and we’d add on, before and after. We came up with our own contribution to the language.

Antiuninterdenominationalistically. 32 letters, if I count correctly.

We won! We broke the record!

We knew we could go on and on, endlessly, running out of paper. The game was open-ended, and we didn’t need to keep playing it.

One of the lessons we learned is that language is the servant and we are the master.

So we thought about it, and decided that, rather than just play the add-on game, we could use language, which we were still learning to master, to say what we mean. That meant we had to know what we mean, decide how to say it, and find a reason for saying it. That meant that we had to think about everything, find the words, then read them over before we give them to anybody else to be sure they say what we want them to say.

I confessed then, and I confess it now, that I’m still learning that lesson.

There’s more to life than playing word games. But once we learn, we can tell when other people haven’t learned the rules, the basics, what’s behind the words, and don’t know what they’re saying.

Notice how I’m not being political. How I’m not assigning the condition of verbal ignorance to any individual, however obvious that may be.

But once you learn the rules of the game (a really good French movie), you can decide for yourself.