A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

the vacuum; all the chances are that it fits it like a plug,

but if it doesn’t let him promptly heave a ZUG after it;

the two together can hardly fail to bung the hole; but if,

by a miracle, they SHOULD fail, let him simply say ALSO!

and this will give him a moment’s chance to think of the

needful word. In Germany, when you load your conversational

gun it is always best to throw in a SCHLAG or two and a ZUG

or two, because it doesn’t make any difference how much

the rest of the charge may scatter, you are bound to bag

something with THEM. Then you blandly say ALSO, and load

up again. Nothing gives such an air of grace and elegance

and unconstraint to a German or an English conversation

as to scatter it full of “Also’s” or “You knows.”

In my note-book I find this entry:

July 1.–In the hospital yesterday, a word of thirteen

syllables was successfully removed from a patient–a

North German from near Hamburg; but as most unfortunately

the surgeons had opened him in the wrong place, under the

impression that he contained a panorama, he died.

The sad event has cast a gloom over the whole community.

That paragraph furnishes a text for a few remarks about

one of the most curious and notable features of my

subject–the length of German words. Some German words

are so long that they have a perspective. Observe these

examples:

Freundschaftsbezeigungen.

Dilettantenaufdringlichkeiten.

Stadtverordnetenversammlungen.

These things are not words, they are alphabetical processions.

And they are not rare; one can open a German newspaper

at any time and see them marching majestically across

the page–and if he has any imagination he can see

the banners and hear the music, too. They impart

a martial thrill to the meekest subject. I take a

great interest in these curiosities. Whenever I come

across a good one, I stuff it and put it in my museum.

In this way I have made quite a valuable collection.

When I get duplicates, I exchange with other collectors,

and thus increase the variety of my stock. Here rare

some specimens which I lately bought at an auction sale

of the effects of a bankrupt bric-a-brac hunter:

Generalstaatsverordnetenversammlungen.

Alterthumswissenschaften.

Kinderbewahrungsanstalten.

Unabhaengigkeitserklaerungen.

Wiedererstellungbestrebungen.

Waffenstillstandsunterhandlungen.

Of course when one of these grand mountain ranges goes

stretching across the printed page, it adorns and ennobles

that literary landscape–but at the same time it is a great

distress to the new student, for it blocks up his way;

he cannot crawl under it, or climb over it, or tunnel

through it. So he resorts to the dictionary for help,

but there is no help there. The dictionary must draw

the line somewhere–so it leaves this sort of words out.

And it is right, because these long things are hardly

legitimate words, but are rather combinations of words,

and the inventor of them ought to have been killed.

They are compound words with the hyphens left out.

The various words used in building them are in the dictionary,

but in a very scattered condition; so you can hunt

the materials out, one by one, and get at the meaning

at last, but it is a tedious and harassing business.

I have tried this process upon some of the above examples.

“Freundshaftsbezeigungen” seems to be “Friendship

demonstrations,”

which is only a foolish and clumsy way of saying “demonstrations

of friendship.” “Unabhaengigkeitserklaerungen” seems

to be “Independencedeclarations,” which is no improvement

upon “Declarations of Independence,” so far as I can see.

“Generalstaatsverordnetenversammlungen” seems to be

“General-statesrepresentativesmeetings,” as nearly as I

can get at it–a mere rhythmical, gushy euphuism for

“meetings of the legislature,” I judge. We used to have

a good deal of this sort of crime in our literature,

but it has gone out now. We used to speak of a things as a

“never-to-be-forgotten” circumstance, instead of cramping

it into the simple and sufficient word “memorable” and then

going calmly about our business as if nothing had happened.

In those days we were not content to embalm the thing

and bury it decently, we wanted to build a monument over it.

But in our newspapers the compounding-disease lingers