My typos

I'm justly proud of my touch typing, which I learned when I was grinding out software manuals at an unseemly clip a few years back. One of the things I was taught is that it's more efficient not to look at the computer screen as you type.

But wouldn't you know it, the other day I typed a whole page with my fingers in the wrong position. I should have had my left fingers on A, S, D, and F, and my right fingers on J, K, L, and semicolon. Instead one or both hands (I forget which) were shifted one key to the right. Naturally this shifted the keys I struck on every row of the keyboard.

I didn't notice my mistake immediately, because the first word I saw on the page was a perfectly good English word. It was surprisingly long, in fact I'm pretty sure it was the longest word that can be obtained in this way. I forget what it was though

I believe the way to get the longest word is to assume only the right hand was shifted (which is allowed under the problem statement) and then let the word be one that's typed entirely using the left hand (which is also allowed, as I read it. A different but also interesting version of the puzzle would be to add the additional requirement that the word typed was _not_ the word intended.)

Anyway, there are several common 12-letter words of this type, such as 'stewardesses' or 'reverberated' or 'desegregated'. Dmitri Borgmann cites the 14-letter 'tesseradecades' ('groups of 14' as an even longer one.

Mike Keith Word play, math, music: