When Samuel Johnson compiled his famous dictionary in the 18th century, the longest word in the English language was believed to be the 27-letter honorificabilitudinitatibus, which appears in Act V of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost. Purists, of course, argued that it did not really count, because it did not seem to be an English word at all and, anyway, it had the decided disadvantage of having no meaning that anyone could glean.
Victorian ecclesiastics resolved this controversy by going one letter better, inventing the term antidisestablishmentarianism, with 28 letters. Today the prize allegedly goes to floccipaucinihilipilification - the action of estimating as worthless - which has 29.
In Germany, however, lexicographical contests of this kind arouse very little interest, since even everyday speech contains Goldsmith's "words of learned length and thund'ring sound", all constructed by the simple expedient of running half a dozen words together. An example, is Vergangenheitsbewaltigung, assimilation of the past, an exercise in which Weather Eye will engage today by recalling the strange ideas of Franz von Paula Gruithuisen.
The planet Venus, viewed from Earth, has regular phases, or changes in apparent shape. The phases, though not visible to the naked eye, are similar to those of the monthly cycle of our Moon, and occur for reasons that are much the same. And it sometimes happens, albeit rarely, that when Venus is at the crescent stage, the dark sector of its disc is faintly visibly, illuminated by a pale, anaemic glow. It is called the "ashen light".
As it happens, the Moon is often seen like this but the reasons are well known: "earthshine" is caused by light reflected towards the Moon from the illuminated Earth, but this cannot explain the ashen light of Venus.
Von Paula Gruithuisen, a somewhat controversial astronomer of the early 19th century, thought he had the answer. He pointed out that the light had been observed in 1759 and again in 1806 and noted that the interval was 47 years. "Let us assume," he theorised, "that a succession of Venusian Napoleons or Alexanders are in power. The reign of an Emperor of Venus might well last for a little under half a century and the observed appearance (of the ashen light) is evidently the result of a general festival of illumination in honour of the ascent of a new emperor to the planet's throne."
Not surprisingly, Gruithuisen's ideas were greeted somewhat sceptically even in his own time. More recently, and plausibly, theories about the ashen light suggest that it may be caused by electrical activity in the planet's upper atmosphere, similar in nature to our own aurora borealis.