Great Gifts in Small Wrappers

North Miami Beach, Florida 10-27-2000 Aaron H. Schectman

THINKING ALLOWED

Essays on issues, ideas and reflections on the times. Published now and
then. Opinions pro or con are welcome.

GREAT GIFTS IN SMALL WRAPPERS

When I was teaching a difficult (a very conservative descriptor) class in
Junior High School a student came up to me with a Fleers' Bubble Gum wrapper
on which was printed:
"pneumonoultrophotomicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis".
It was purported to be the longest word in the English Language and was the
name of a disease of the lungs caused by coal and mineral dust in mines.
Needless to say I was intrigued partly because it is a mouthful and partly
because I saw this as a way to get this "difficult" class to pay attention
to learning how to read and spell. I learned it to get them to spell.

I mentioned it to my grandson last week and was delighted to find that his
father could recite it too. I used it in my high school classes, my
undergraduate classes and my graduate classes as an exemplar on how to bring
a "Goliath" word down to "David" size.

We all are acquainted with the little slips of paper enclosed in stale
"Fortune Cookies" in all Chinese restaurants. They run out of the sayings
of Confucius and never quote Chairman Mao's Little Red Book. Then they
insert silly things. I never get great value out of these and almost never
even nibble on the cookies. I made great use out of disease miners get
through lessons in syllabication, pronunciation, finding small words
embedded in large ones and in discussing health problems involving lung
tissue.

On the trip home from California Carol allotted me several chocolate
candies that were wrapped in red foil. I discovered messages on the inner
surface. I quote one of these: "Wisdom has two parts: 1) having a lot to
say, and 2) not saying it.

I have no problem with the first part but I seem to be stumped by the
second. How can I control it? Carol's Evaluation: 10 out of 10.