I recently read that Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables contains one of the longest sentences in the French language: 823 words without a full stop.

Even though Hugo wasn’t banging it out on his laptop, it got me thinking how it’s much easier to be long-winded when typing in French. For all those unacquainted with the French keyboard, the layout is much more practical and conducive to verbal diarrhoea… all except the full stop. You can have a comma without a hassle, but to actually conclude a sentence, it requires a shift.

Furthermore, while it was a veritable cinch to swap to the French keyboard (once I found @, € and ?), I just find it so difficult to swap back to typing on a British one. There’s nothing funnier than watching someone try to type as they’re just realising that the keys have spirited away from under their fingers. On the flip side, there’s nothing more frustrating that the role-reversal discovery that you’re now in the hot seat and your formerly fleet fingers have turned into incoherent sausage tools of confusion.

Apparently… Timothy Fullerton claimed that the Les Misérables sentence was the longest in world literature in his Triviata: A Compendium of Useless Information (1975). Which IS utterly useless (he at least got one thing right), because there are doubts as to whether it’s even the longest sentence in French literature. Pfft!