October 21, 1997

antidisestablishmentarianism

My question is about the infamously prefix-laden "antidisestablishmentarianism," which I first saw in, of all places, an episode of "The Jetsons." Simply lobbing off the ends and interpreting the negatives and double negatives wherever I can, I've taken it to mean 'the opposition to the deprivation of status'. So, where was this word first used, and, well...why for crying out loud?

Let's get one thing straight: while antidisestablishmentarianism is a real word, that has been really used with real meaning, it is mainly known for being an extremely long word. (See floccinaucinihilipilification for a similar example.)

Now, the meaning. One meaning of establish is 'to make (a church) a national or state institution'. Establishment is the process of making a church an official institution. In nineteenth-century England, when the Anglican Church was supported by the state, there was a movement for the separation of church and state. To separate church and state was to disestablish them. The withdrawal of state support of the church was known as disestablishment.

As you are probably about to guess, a person who favors disestablishment was known as a disestablishmentarian. This is formed with the suffix -arian meaning 'a person who supports, advocates, or practices a doctrine, theory, or set of principles associated with the base word'. Examples are totalitarian or vegetarian.

(We're almost there!) Now, a person who is opposed to disestablishment--a person, that is, who thinks that the Church and the state should be together--is known as an antidisestablishmentarian. And finally, the belief of such a person is known as antidisestablishmentarianism, which we define in the Random House Unabridged Dictionary as 'opposition to the withdrawal of state support or recognition from an established church, especially the Anglican Church in 19th-century England'. (Theoretically these words could be used of any separation of church and state; in practice they were only used of the Anglican issue in the 19th century.)

Again, the only reason this word is familiar is as an example of a very long word; it has nothing to do with the importance of church-state separation issues. As for the length issue, well, English is not an agglutinative language (one, that is, where words are frequently formed by combining many shorter elements, examples being Turkish, Swahili, and certain Native American languages), but you can often make words longer by adding affixes. I can even make our word longer. Watch: antidisestablishmentarianismistically, which I claim means something like 'in the manner of the belief of antidisestablishmentarianism'.

The various shorter forms of these words, which I am getting tired of typing, appear throughout the nineteenth century; the longest word, which appears as the title of this entry, is found by the beginning of this century.