Deccan Herald.

Olympic bronze medallists Vijender Singh (left) and Sushil Kumar at their felicitation in Bangalore on Thursday. DH PHOTO

I enjoyed this photo in Deccan Herald today.

I enjoyed this middle in Deccan Herald today.
RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE Vignettes from a bibliophile By Sharbelle Fernandez Reading adds to the font of trivia stashed away in her interested mind.
Groucho Marx said, “I find television very educative. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” Reading is indeed, a wonderful hobby. I find it very enlightening and often, amusing. The trivia that I have collected is notable. Allow me to share some of it with you.
I remember reading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. In it was one of the longest sentences that I had ever read. It had eight hundred and twenty three words, ninety-three commas, fifty-one semi colons and four dashes. Presently, William Faulkner’s novel Absalom holds the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest sentence. It has one thousand, two hundred and eighty-seven words.
Want to know which is the longest and shortest name of a railway station in India ? The longest one is called “Venkatanarasimharajuvaripeta” and the shortest is “Ib”. Got anything to add?
Do you enjoy the word monsters? If you suffer from the following phobia
“Hippopolomonstrosesquipedaliophobia” halt and read no more, because it describes the fear for long words. The longest word is a forty-five lettered word known as “pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis”. It describes a lung disease caused by tiny parts of volcanic dust. Quasihemidemisemiquaver is a hundred twenty-eighth note in music. Are you tongue-tied?
A deipnosophist is one who is an expert at dinner table conversations. That reminds me, the longest after-dinner-speech, was given by Dr Donald Thomas, at a city college in New York , about Vegetarian Athletic Nutrition. It lasted for thirty-two hours and twenty-five minutes.
I came across these words whilst reading. Borborygmus is the noise our tummy makes when it rumbles and sternutation is the act of sneezing. The dot above the letter “i” is called a tittle. They say that there are no words in the English Language that rhyme with orange, purple and silver. Strange?
A “zorse” is a cross between a male zebra and a female horse and a “swoose” is a cross between a swan and a goose. A “lemato” is a tomato that is genetically modified to give hints of lemon and rose.
I thought, correctness of language was my forte, now I know for certain that there is still a lot of room for learning. As Josh Billings rightly said, “The trouble with most folks isn’t so much their ignorance as knowing so many things that ain’t so.”