✉️ Frank's Five — Issue No. 3
Friday, June 19, 2026 • This week's theme: Words, Words, Words
Morning, friend. This week we're over in the word drawers, which are Frank's favorite drawers, and he will not be pretending otherwise for the sake of the other drawers.
🥇 The Headliner
The story: in 1935, Everett M. Smith, president of the National Puzzlers' League, unveiled the word at the league's annual meeting — expressly to serve as the longest word in the English language. It's defined as a lung disease caused by inhaling very fine silica dust, of the sort you'd find near a volcano. Newspapers picked it up, the word caught on, and the dictionaries eventually let it in the front door.
Doctors, for the record, don't use it — they say silicosis, which does the same job in nine letters. But the long version is genuine dictionary material to this day, a word invented to be a champion that actually became one. It's the "Rocky" of the reference shelf.
Frank has typed it out exactly once, on the machine pictured above, to see how it felt. Verdict: like a very long staircase with no landing.
🔢 Four More Beauties
- No. 2 The dot over a lowercase i or j has a proper name: it's called a tittle. When you cross every t and dot every i, you are, officially, minding your tittles. — Word Facts
- No. 3 "Typewriter" is one of the longest common English words you can type using only the top letter row of a QWERTY keyboard. Try it — every letter lives up there. — Word Facts
- No. 4 A group of crows is called a murder. The English language has never once been asked to explain itself. — Word Facts
- No. 5 After the Norman Conquest of 1066, French was the language of England's royal court and law for roughly three centuries — which is why English cows become "beef" and pigs become "pork" the moment they reach the table. — History Facts
🚫 The Weekly Debunk
"Einstein failed math as a boy." FALSE — Frank checked
Albert Einstein was, inconveniently for this story, excellent at math from the start. Shown the claim in a newspaper clipping late in his life, Einstein replied that he had never failed in mathematics, and that before he was fifteen he had mastered differential and integral calculus. His school records back him up.
Where did the myth come from? One likely culprit: the Swiss school he attended graded on a 6-point scale, and at one point the scale's direction was flipped — so a top mark from one year looks like a bottom mark to a careless reader. That, plus the eternal appeal of "even Einstein flunked," and the legend wrote itself. Frank's ruling: comforting, catchy, false. Two out of three doesn't get you filed.
❓ Frank's Stumper
First, the answer to last week's Stumper (the only one-syllable U.S. state): Maine. Every other state needs at least two syllables; Maine gets it done in one, which is very Maine of it.
This week's Stumper: Which pair lived closer together in time — Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex, or Tyrannosaurus rex and you?
Answer revealed in next Friday's email. Yes, it's a trick. No, not the way you think.
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