Van Doren was a contestant along with Elfrida Von Nardroff on the quiz show ‘Twenty-one.” Elfride labored furiously from inside the glass box to spell what, in retrospect, was just a faux complex word that any idiot could have spelled with a little contemplation. The word is just a string of prefixes and suffixes around the word “establish.”
The word the genius wrestled to the ground was...
antidisestablishmentarianism.
That she first identified this as the longest word in the English language should have tipped us off to the show being fixed.
I saw the show. Afterwards i got a cookie as prize when i spelled it in class. Never knew it wasn’t the longest word till after college
“Antidisestablishmentarianism” was later replaced as the longest word (ca. 1961) by “pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis.” Or should that be “pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis”?
I remember Elfrida Von Nardroff but not that particular episode.
Dang, and here I had always been lead to believe the longest word in English is, “Supercallifragilisticexpialadosous”.