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Mark Twain, wherever he is now, has been a-weepin:
... The Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz is no more ...German's Longest Word Killed By New Law
... Some German words are so long that they have a perspective ... These things are not words, they are alphabetical processions. And they are not rare; one can open a German newspaper at any time and see them marching majestically across the page -- and if he has any imagination he can see the banners and hear the music, too ... Of course when one of these grand mountain ranges goes stretching across the printed page, it adorns and ennobles that literary landscape -- but at the same time it is a great distress to the new student, for it blocks up his way; he cannot crawl under it, or climb over it, or tunnel through it. So he resorts to the dictionary for help, but there is no help there. The dictionary must draw the line somewhere -- so it leaves this sort of words out. And it is right, because these long things are hardly legitimate words, but are rather combinations of words, and the inventor of them ought to have been killed ...
The Awful German Language