MEGSZENTSÉGTELENÍTHETETLENSÉGESKEDÉSEITEKÉRT.
The word that every Hungarian knows but none of them has ever used it. I mean seriously. No one has ever used it seriously. Not seriously, of course, we love to proudly joke about it whenever we get the audience.
Why? Because it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t even mean anything! It is just a big pile of modifiers added to the root word „szent” (meaning „saint”). Still… due to more than 90% of the word being just different modifiers with no standalone meaning, Hungarians have no problem with „feeling” it as if it was a real word.
Hungarian is an agglutinative language. So we can take a word as the base, then, add more details or even create new meaning with just using different prefixes and suffixes. For example, I can take the word „ház” (=house), then, modify it like „házam” (my house). Then, I can say „házaim” (my houses) and finally, change it to „házaimban” (in my houses). And I still haven’t left the room between the two spaces on my sentence.
Or let me quote a nice made-up word full of meanings from one of the contemporary bands: „kikóstol”. (Source: 🎧 Szabó Balázs Bandája: Magam veleje ) Here, the root is the verb „to taste”. Like trying the taste of a food or a drink. While the „ki-„ prefix means „out”. The two together doesn’t exist as a Hungarian word, still we understand that even if the line „Mindent, amit a fényből kikóstoltunk éjjel” should translate into English as „Everything we tasted from the light at night”, it wasn’t just a simple tasting of the light but we took a piece out for ourselves to taste it. Puzzling, isn’t it?
Back to „megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért”… It should translate to something like „for your [repeated] acts of pretending to be someone who cannot be desecrated” in English. See? I told you: it makes perfect nonsense.
Still here? You are curios how the heck a 5-character-long word becomes a 44-character-long one just through a train of modifications, right? Well, wait no more, here you are:
szent = saint
szentség = sanctity, sacrament, sainthood (-ség helps form nouns, but also helps create a noun that describes a state)
szentségtelen = unholy, profane (prefix telen = „without”)
szentségtelenít = to profane, to desecrate (verb form; root + -ít, a verb-forming suffix meaning „to make [X]”)
megszentségtelenít = to desecrate completely (prefix meg- implies completion or intensity)
megszentségteleníthet = can desecrate (suffix -het/-hat = potential mood: „can, may”)
megszentségteleníthetetlen = cannot be desecrated (suffix -etlen/-tlen = negation, „not X-able”)
megszentségteleníthetetlenség= the state of being impossible to desecrate (abstract noun form: „-ség”)
megszentségteleníthetetlenséges= having the quality of being impossible to desecrate (adjective-like; „-es” = „with [X]-ness”)
megszentségteleníthetetlenségesked= to behave in a way that acts like being impossibly undesecratable (verb root from noun+adjective: „-ked” implies pretentious or exaggerated behavior)
megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedés= the act of behaving in an over-the-top „I cannot be desecrated” way (noun form of the above behavior)
megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedése= his/her acts of behaving in such a manner (possessive: „-e” = „his/her”)
megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedései= his/her acts of behaving in such a manner several times (plural possessive: „-ei” = „his/her …s”)
megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitek= your (plural) acts of behaving in such a way („-eitek” = second person plural possessive)
megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért= for your acts of behaving as if you were impossibly indesecratable (the suffix -ért = „for”, indicating cause or reason)
And now… everyone who got this far deserves some chocolate, including me.
