Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

If you know me, or have just read a cetain few of my entries, you will see that I am one rather curious individual. Incessantly asking questions (which can get very annoying, anyone will tell you), I want to know it all, and I hate not understanding. There are lots of things I wonder about, and I'm sure many of you have too, that we could easily answer, but never get around to doing. I think that when you can find the answer to a question, than you should do so, and that is exactly what I am endeavoring to do in this blog. I hope you have as much fun learning as I did.

If someone asked you what's the longest word in the English word in the dictionary, there's a good chance you will say Antidisestablishmentarianism. But asked the definition of such a twenty-eight letter word, there's an equally good chance that you won't know it. Well, this word means the political position of being opposed to the idea of removing the Church of England from its position as the state church of England (the official church of the country). It was supported by none other than a goup dubbed the antidisestablishmentarians.
This is the longest non-coined and nontechnical word in the English language, any others that you come across will either have been coined (made up for the purpose of being the longest word) or technical (generally referring to science).
This word was formed through adding affixes to the base word (agglutinative construction), the base word which was establish.
This 12-syllable-long word literally means, according to Wikipedia, is the movement or ideology that opposes disestablishment.

I've heard this word countless times in song lyrics and in books, and mentioned by my very intelligent friends, and had always, embarrassed, just nodded along. Today I decided to find out what this term meant. Narcissism describes the trait of excessive self-love based on self-image or ego. (Thanks Wikpedia; even though I don't particularly enjoy copying and pasting, I don't feel at liberty re-writing definitions that I am just learning myself).
I found the story of derivation of this term quite interesting.
It comes, like a lot of words, from Greek; and in this instance, the Greek myth of Narcissus. Narcissus was a beautiful Grecian youth who rejected the hopeful advances of the nymp (female mythological entity), Echo. As punishment, his fate was to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool of water.
Unable to fulfill his love, Narcissus suffered with longing, and changed into the flower that bears his name, the narcissus (as seen above).

You might remember (if you are in my class, that is) Mr. V, mentioning intrinsic and extrinsic during a lesson. He didn't end up actually explaining the two terms though, because he could see that the majority of the class was getting restless. I noted the terms down, and decided to make them part of this blog, and share the knowledge that we could have had. (Note that the definitions look pretty complicated, and Mr. V. would have explained it a lot better.)
These terms are used in a lot of contexts,but in this case, I am using the philosophical definition.
These words are used in relation to the value and properties of something. I've come to the decision to explore the relation with properties today (search intrinsic values, and you might see why).
So, intrinsic and extrinsic properties.
An intrinsic property is a property that an object has of itself, independent of other things.
An extrinsic property is one that depends on the object's relationship with other things.
A very good example that I saw when researching was: For example, mass (generally the term describing the amount of matter in an object) is a physical intrinsic property of any physical object, whereas weight is an extrinsic property that varies depending on the strength of the gravitational field in which the object is placed.
David Lewis (a philosopher of the late 20th century) wrote some criteria defining these terms and what makes them different, and this one helped me to understand: The intrinsic properties of something depend only on that thing; whereas the extrinsic properties of something may depend, wholly or partly, on something else.

To finish on a lighter and simpler note, the phobia connected to the fear of having peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth is known as Arachibutyrophobia.