While translating a German text the other day, I stumbled across the word Infrastrukturplanungsbeschleunigungsgesetz, i.e. "Infrastructure Planning Acceleration Act." Wait -- no one would say, "Hey, I recently stumbled across the Matterhorn." So let me rephrase that:

I smacked into that sucker.

German is, of course, notorious for its monstrous noun formations. In his essay "The Awful German Language," Mark Twain wrote: "Some German words are so long that they have a perspective." Indeed. Like Picasso's "Guernica," Lower Manhattan, or Rosie O'Donnell, they can only be taken in fully from a distance.

How about this one? Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, i.e. "Beef Labeling Oversight Transfer Law," which made the short(!) list of the Wiesbaden-based German Language Society's 1999 Word of the Year.

Why are German words allowed to get so long, anyway? Is it -- dare we say it? -- a Teutonic foible for the phallic, found also in fast cars, spiked helmets and endless sausages? Or an attraction to the martial, in which letters even, whole battalions of them, are made to march in tight ranks across the page?

Perhaps, gentle reader. Perhaps. But let me advance another theory: a German predilection for romanticism, i.e. for the dark, heavy and mysterious, which in textual terms translates into the abstract, complex, and convoluted.

Long compound nouns stand out, majestically, like mountains, their meanings partly shrouded in clouds. Or to use a different metaphor, they are forests unto themselves, dense and somewhat forbidding, daring you to enter.