The German language lost its longest word earlier this month as a law change in the EU rendered it obsolete.
The word, ‘Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz’, means: “a law delegating beef label monitoring”.
The word, which is a staggering 65 letters long, first came into being at the turn of the Millennium. Fortunately, for anyone struggling with it, the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, gave it handy acronym.
That was RkReUAUG. Not particularly easy on the eye, tongue or mind either.
However, long words in the German language are not a rarity. The Teutonic tongue is littered with compound words that are over 30 and 40 letters long. These so called ‘tapeworm’ words do rarely make it into the dictionary though.
In the English language, long words are certainly not too common. Stemming from the first language creation, the words have always been short, sharp, snappy and to the point. It is very much how web writing needs to be done too, which seems to be a rather happy coincidence.
Unfortunately though, many companies fail to do this. The result is overly verbose and bombastic language, which few people want to read and many people simply do not understand. It is why most websites of note, certainly the ones seeing an excellent ROI, are created by outsourced professionals.
Handing over control of creating newsfeeds this way just makes sense. SEO copywriting service companies do what they do best, whilst the companies they are working for continue to focus on other tasks.
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