You've given me a wonderful idea: One profession not included is lexicographer (a writer of dictionaries). See, there's this editor at a publishing house who goes nuts having to deal with the endless repetition of always A's, then B's and so forth; so he murders his publisher, dismembers the body into tiny slivers with a sharpened letter opener and gets rid of them by sticking each into the Z sections (rarely used) of all the new editions of the unabridged dictionaries. The books are distributed all over the world & the corpus delicti's in Corpus Christi and lots of other places, too. Columbo solves through use of Dog's nose--and DNA (Darn it. There's that alphabet stuff again).

Hey, Joe. How about a Columbo ep that takes place in The National Spelling Bee? A fanatical parent bribes the moderator to give his son's major competitor more difficult words like--oh--"unused" for example, while his kid gets easy ones like--oh-- "antidisestablishmentarism." See? I was asking folks to come up with a profession and a plot line . . .

You mean "antidisestablishmentarianism"?

Yeah, I figured a word not spelt correctly would be a pretty tough word to get right. Right? Kinda like Dan Quayle's "potatoe" back in '92 or thereabouts.

Kev-La!!! terrific!! you spelled the word right...I was going to correct Mr. Michael, but I did not have the heart to do so......
That word means so much to me........ok....this is going to sound a little freaky...but everyone here knows that I am freaky...so here goes....I was in the sixth grade...and I had a crush on this kid Thomas Iaccobucci....he was one of the smartest kids in the class and also a great speller...well he charmed me one day on the bus ride home from school and spelled this word...and I was in awe!!! and then....do you you know what he did??????????? He gave me my first kiss!!!!!
I will darken the story by saying that the poor boy had buck teeth out to his nose!!! And his nose was pretty long!! They were horrendous!! (He got braces the next year, but our love affair was over by then!!!) But the little peck of a kiss was sweet...yet awkward.....but antidisestablishmentarianism will always be a word that brings back romantic memories..............how sick am I?????????

My first encounter with the word wasn't so romantic. In my sophomore year of high school, we took a course entitled "Democracy in Action." It wasn't much of a course taught by a first-year teacher. Anyway, one day a kid (whose sister was the most beautiful girl in the school) said he knew the longest word in the dictionary and spelt it . . . boy was I impressed. For whatever stupid reason I remember it--except, of course, how it's spelled.