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.