Today I learned...

[Rath Darkblade]

Today I learned a new joke.

Have you heard about the new movie called Constipation?

It hasn't come out yet.

Gone with the wind, perhaps?

 

[Rath Darkblade]

I like that. Maximum verbosity in term papers is always desirable. Best I ever managed was " Interspecific Hybridization of Gossypium hirsutum and Gossypium barbadense."

The longest sentence I had ever seen was the 1996 winner of the Bad Writing Contest, from Plato etc.: The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution by Professor Roy Bhaskar. It went as follows:

Indeed, dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal -- of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelian provenance; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other ideologically and/or psycho-somatically buried source) new and old alike; of the primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistomologic fallacy with its ontic dual; of the analytic problematic laid down by Plato, which Hegel served only to replicate in his actualist monovalent analytic reinstatement in transfigurative reconciling dialectical connection, while in his hubristic claims for absolute idealism he inaugurated the Comtean, Kierkgaardian and Nietzchean eclipses of reason, replicating the fundaments of positivism through its transmutation route to the superidealism of a Baudrillard.

Some sentence are too important to understand, and it would be difficult to improve on this one. It's a splendid piece of prose, and I'm certain many of us will attempt to read it aloud without taking a breath.

 

[Iain Aschendale]

The longest sentence I had ever seen was the 1996 winner of the Bad Writing Contest, from Plato etc.: The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution by Professor Roy Bhaskar. It went as follows:

Indeed, dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal -- of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelian provenance; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other ideologically and/or psycho-somatically buried source) new and old alike; of the primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistomologic fallacy with its ontic dual; of the analytic problematic laid down by Plato, which Hegel served only to replicate in his actualist monovalent analytic reinstatement in transfigurative reconciling dialectical connection, while in his hubristic claims for absolute idealism he inaugurated the Comtean, Kierkgaardian and Nietzchean eclipses of reason, replicating the fundaments of positivism through its transmutation route to the superidealism of a Baudrillard.

Some sentence are too important to understand, and it would be difficult to improve on this one. It's a splendid piece of prose, and I'm certain many of us will attempt to read it aloud without taking a breath.

That's 131 words. The late Iain M. Banks made a hobby of creating monster sentences. For example, this one from The Algebraist clocks in at 167:

Picking a fight with a species as widespread, long-lived, irascible and - when it suited them - single-minded as the Dwellers too often meant that just when - or even geological ages after when - you thought that the dust had long since settled, bygones were bygones and any unfortunate disputes were all ancient history, a small planet appeared without warning in your home system, accompanied by a fleet of moons, themselves surrounded with multitudes of asteroid-sized chunks, each of those riding cocooned in a fuzzy shell made up of untold numbers of decently hefty rocks, every one of them travelling surrounded by a large landslide’s worth of still smaller rocks and pebbles, the whole ghastly collection travelling at so close to the speed of light that the amount of warning even an especially wary and observant species would have generally amounted to just about sufficient time to gasp the local equivalent of ‘What the fu--?’ before they disappeared in an impressive if wasteful blaze of radiation.

Same book, this guy is 181 words:

The Archimandrite Luseferous, warrior priest of the Starveling Cult of Leseum9 IV and effective ruler of one hundred and seventeen stellar systems, forty-plus inhabited planets, numerous significant artificial immobile habitats and many hundreds of thousands of civilian capital ships, who was Executive High Admiral of the Shroud Wing Squadron of the Four-Hundred-and-Sixty-Eighth Ambient Fleet (Det.) and who had once been Triumvirate Rotational human\non-human Representative for Cluster Epiphany Five at the Supreme Galactic Assembly, in the days before the latest ongoing Chaos and the last, fading rumbles of the Disconnect Cascade, had some years ago caused the head of his once-greatest enemy, the rebel chief Stinausin, to be struck from his shoulders, attached without delay to a long-term life-support mechanism and then hung upside down from the ceiling of his hugely impressive study in the outer wall of Sheer Citadel - with its view over Junch City and Faraby Bay towards the hazy vertical slot that was Force Gap - so that the Archimandrite could, when the mood took him, which was fairly frequently, use his old adversary’s head as a punchball.

 

[Rigor Mortis]

That's 131 words. The late Iain M. Banks made a hobby of creating monster sentences. For example, this one from The Algebraist clocks in at 167:

I entered a story in a competition back in old town that purposely had several run-on sentences, the first two of which came in at 70 words each, which was accidental but clear evidence that serendipity was on my side. Another measured 108, a few others around the eighty to a hundred mark, but the longest, according to my just now check, comes in at 151 words. Other pieces I've written also have extended sentences but less deliberately so. I do love a good, nurturing sentence.