A Final Thought: The Perils of Quicksand

I saw a meme recently that made me laugh out loud. It read: “Quicksand turned out to be much less of a problem than I thought it would be.”

The author of that line must have grown up in the 1950s and ’60s, when quicksand was frequently featured in movies and TV shows. Hollywood liked quicksand because it was a cheap way to add suspense by placing a hero or heroine in life-threatening peril. Sand and water don’t cost much, and the danger created real tension and drama—especially for a kid like me, who was convinced quicksand was lurking around every corner.

I had to be careful where I stepped.

This plot device was so popular that one Slate article reported that quicksand appeared in nearly 3% of all TV shows and movies in the 1960s, including Lawrence of Arabia, Tarzan and Gilligan’s Island. You’ll also find versions of it in two of my favorite movies from the 1980s: The Neverending Story and The Princess Bride.

While quicksand is a real phenomenon, it rarely acts as a deadly trap. It’s a saturated mixture of sand, clay, and water that behaves as a non-Newtonian fluid—appearing solid until pressure makes it flow like a liquid. You can get stuck, but you’ll probably only sink up to your waist. (Ketchup, by the way, is also a non-Newtonian fluid. It becomes thinner and easier to pour when shaken.)

As kids, we were taught how to escape from quicksand: “Do not struggle; just relax and float on it.” We learned this along with other dangers, like VD, eating red M&Ms and sitting too close to the television. 

Another thing that fascinated me as a kid was the word antidisestablishmentarianism. My friends and I could say it and spell it, as if it were supercalifragilisticexpialidocious from the movie Mary Poppins.

At 28 letters, it was—we believed—the longest word in English that wasn’t a scientific or technical term. We were wrong, though. To my knowledge, the longest non-scientific, non-technical word in English is actually floccinaucinihilipilification, which means “estimating something as worthless.”

My editor practices floccinaucinihilipilification all the time.

As a writer, I love words, especially discovering their origins, which is the study of etymology. The word antidisestablishmentarianism interests me because it’s basically the word “establish” with a bunch of prefixes and suffixes added. Here’s what I mean:

1. The verb establish becomes a noun when you add the suffix “ment” to it.
2. Establishment becomes a person when you add “arian” (as in “librarian” or “vegetarian”).
3. Establishmentarian becomes an ideology when you add “ism” (think “capitalism” or “feminism”).
4. The addition of the prefix “dis” turns establishmentarianism into its opposite, while the final “anti” makes it the opposite of its opposite.

Did you follow that?

Based on all those prefixes and suffixes, you’d think the word means “being against people who are against the establishment.” That’s close, but the term was coined to refer to something more specific. 

In 1534, Henry VIII officially “established” the Church of England as an independent entity by breaking away from the Roman Catholic Church. He did this mainly because Pope Clement VII refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so he could marry Anne Boleyn.

Then, in the 1830s and on a few other occasions in the 19th century, some people favored the separation of church and state and opposed an officially established state religion. These dissenters aimed to “disestablish” the Church of England, which is why their movement was called disestablishmentarianism. Those who opposed them had their own movement: antidisestablishmentarianism.

The word gained popularity among my generation because, in 1955, 12-year-old Gloria Lockerman famously spelled “antidisestablishmentarianism” on the TV quiz show The $64,000 Question, when she won $8,000, nearly $100,000 in today’s dollars. She—and the word—became a national sensation partly because she was a young Black girl doing something intellectually spectacular to win big money on a popular national game show at the very start of the Civil Rights Movement.

See, this is what I love about etymology. Once you step into it, it pulls you in.

Like quicksand.

Mitch@MimiVanderhaven.com