On
July 5, 1983, Pat Moynihan wrote to the editors of the Guinness Book of
Records requesting that he be considered for an entry. The reason, he
wrote, was his coining of the word ‘Floccinaucinihilipilificationism,’ which
was, he claimed, the longest in the English language. Moynihan had, he
conceded, merely added ‘ism’ to an existing word, but with ‘a serious literary
purpose: to suggest the pomposity of much contemporary economic forecasting.’ Moynihan
had first used the word in a 1981 review for The New Yorker of John Kenneth Galbraith’s memoirs, “A Life In Our
Times.” He had, he told the editors, either written (or intended to write) at
the time with this request. ‘In either case, I don’t recall receiving an answer.’[1]
Sadly,
Moynihan’s papers do not contain a response from the Guinness editors. Nonetheless, he remained proud of the coinage and
committed to gaining official recognition for it. He embarked on an ultimately
unsuccessful campaign to have it included in the Oxford English Dictionary. As late as 1991, he was writing to his
friend William Safire, author of the New
York Times Magazine’s “On Language” column, requesting that he use the word
in a future publication. Moynihan had, he wrote, ‘three solid citings so far’
and one more, by Safire, would surely clinch it. ‘I don’t have much to leave my
grandchild, but he maybe could grow up to learn that his old granddad amounted
to something after all.’[2]
Pat
Moynihan liked to break records. In February 1974, as U.S. Ambassador to India,
he made his first attempt to enter the Guinness Book of Records, for
presenting the Indian government with the largest single cheque in the history
of banking. The cheque – totalling Rs. 16,640,000,000, or approximately $2,046,700,000
– was written to cancel India’s substantial food aid debts, an ongoing source
of tension between the two powers. Moynihan had written to Guinness at the instigation of his son, John – in having this
achievement recognised, he wrote, he would win ‘the permanent regard of [his]
14 year old son who at times appears to read nothing else.’ The appeal was
successful, and an entry, accompanied by a photograph, appeared in future
editions.[3]
The delight Moynihan
took in overturning precedents extended to other areas of his life. After his
election to the Senate in 1976, for instance, he took a seat on the Finance
Committee and enjoyed reminding people that he was the first New York Democrat to
serve on it in a century. ‘My predecessor put [Samuel J.] Tilden in nomination
for president.’[4] He
took similar pride in becoming, in 1993, the first New Yorker to chair that
committee since the 1850s.[5]
In 1982, he won re-election to the Senate from New York by a margin of over a
million votes, boasting that this made him ‘one of the five millionaires of the
Senate.’ ‘If you can’t be a millionaire of the other kind, why not be this
kind?’ he told the audience at his victory celebrations at the Sheraton Center.
‘In fact, I prefer this kind.’[6]
We could indulge in idle
speculation about what, if anything, this impulse reveals about Moynihan’s
character. However, we prefer to leave that to others, and will instead turn
our attention to the far more important task of devising some feat to get this
conference into the Guinness Book of
World Records.
All suggestions welcome.
[1] 'Floccinaucinihilipilification' is the 'action or habit of estimating something as worthless.' Letter, DPM to the
editors, Guinness Book of World Records, July 5, 1983, papers of Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, Manuscript Reading Room, Library of Congress Part II, Box 6; Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, “Floccinaucinihilipilificationism,” The New Yorker, August 10, 1981;
[2] Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, Steven R. Weisman (ed.), Daniel
Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary (New York,
2010), 571.
[3] Moynihan, Weisman
(ed.), Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Portrait
in Letters, 325
[4] Garry Wills, Lead Time: A Journalist’s Education (New
York, 2004), 139.
[5] Michael Barone, “A
Renaissance Man In The Senate,” in Robert A. Katzmann (ed.), Daniel Patrick Moynihan: The Intellectual In
Public Life (Washington, D.C., 2004), 136.
[6] The other four were
Alan Cranston of California, John Glenn of Ohio, Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts,
and Charles H. Percy of Illinois. Maurice Carroll, “Moynihan Wins Overwhelming
Victory,” NYT, November 3, 1982
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