When I say the word "iron", I use a pronunciation that approximates "eye-run", in contrast to most people, whose pronunciation approximates "eye-urn". In regular conversation the distinction is rarely noticed, but it remains a source of great amusement to my friends when we play Boggle and I announce "iron" among my words. I pronounce "irony" similarly, and on the rare occasion I refer to those fireplace thingies, I call them "an-dye-runs".

Oddly enough, I don't apply the same pattern to "environment". Along with most of the world I say "envi-urn-ment" and "envi-urn-mentalist". Listening to the car radio on the way home from work today, I heard a political ad in which "the envi-run-ment" was listed as one of the values neglected by the Republican candidate. It sounded funny to me.

Whether you say "envi-run-ment" or "envi-urn-ment", it's four syllables. If you acknowledge the vowelless "zm" as a syllable — and I see no reason why you shouldn't — environmentalism is a seven-syllable word, which makes it a good candidate for our puzzle, I think. (It's also a 16-letter word, which will amuse Andrew and no one else.)

The -ism theme suggests other candidates, such as individualism or intellectualism. Most such words are more like to occur in -ist form than -ism, unless they become political buzzwords like environmentalism or multiculturalism.

The comments on Andrew's blog, where we were linked, include several good candidates, among which I exclude extraordinarily, which I would insist has only six syllables.

Someone ran an analysis through a computer and offered a list of ten. About half of them betray two biases in the Google-provided source text: (1) written English is very different from spoken English, and (2) written English on the Web tilts heavily toward academia. To meet the "ordinary conversation" test, I think their order needs some rearranging, but most of them are pretty good: telecommunication, interdisciplinary, meteorological, socioeconomic, intelligibility, heterogeneity, autobiographical, incompatibility, industrialization, epidemiologic.

Not making the list, but better than most on it, is someone else's suggestion of homosexuality (which, along with autobiographical and incompatibility, I see meets the "Mary had a little lamb" test). Disallowed but earning an honorable mention nevertheless, is everyone's favorite tmetic interjection, unfuckingbelievable.

Also among Andrew's comment was a link to a page explaining why the "miniscule" spelling has become so widespread for so long that it really must be acknowledged as a legitimate variant and thus not a misspelling at all. I am horrified by the prospect, but I really can't dispute the logic, having used the same argument to defend other changes in language.

That weird-looking adjective two paragraphs back is not a typo. From time to time I like to attempt to achieve the elusive goal of writing a Google-wide hapax legomenon without abandoning meaningful and comprehensible writing. It's harder than you'd think. This one, I see, would have failed even without the TMetic brand battery.

(Benzene has scaled that lofty peak at least once that I know of. As of this writing, it's still there, though you may have to pay a visit to the source page first, to refresh Google's memory. I worry that, like a no-hitter in baseball, this is the sort of thing that is lost the moment one mentions it out loud. By tomorrow it will probably be somebody's screen name somewhere.)

For those wondering about the actual word, here's a hint:

You'll probably still need to consult your dictionary. That's OK. Here at Benzene we like encouraging dictionary use.

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