Austria's 52-letter word of the year

[Igel]

1. We think too highly of orthography.

"The Graduate Student Association Forum charter revision subcommittee chair said that the revision process was not a success" contains three nouns: The first is 73 letters long (under German orthographic rules, and unless I miscounted). The sentence contour shows that the first noun is long. The second noun is "revision process". Leaving the third noun as "success."

There's this latinate tradition in English grammar to somehow think of those first string of words as somehow not forming a compound. It's not the best analysis, it's just the tradition. At its heart, English is still Germanic.

To a Romance speaker, such compounds are a mess. To a native speaker, we parse them without much thinking about it. Personally, the German term isn't so much a separate lexical item as something repeatedly formed for the occasion.

Like "voting irregularity" or "repeat runoff".