What I Learned Today

Every group of hobbyists develops its own jargon, which can be fascinating to examine. The invented words and coinages reveal something about the habits, attitudes, and passions of the group, whether or not you know or care about the hobby.

Take for example GeoLex, the geocaching lexicon. As a novice geocacher (really just a geoseeker), I’m peripherally aware of the geocaching culture, but I keep stumbling across unfamiliar abbreviations and cryptic terms in the cache logs at geocaching.com. So I welcomed the chance to learn some more of the lingo—and some of them are pretty funny.

For example, there’s a type of cache called a “mystery cache”, in which the true coordinates of the cache are not posted but instead you must figure them out. (I call these “puzzle caches” because usually you have to solve some sort of puzzle first, which only adds to the fun!) In fact, I recently tackled my first puzzle cache, called “Stargazer’s Delight”. To get the coordinates, you must “decode” a series of images of stellar nebulae, clusters, and galaxies. Totally awesome puzzle! I actually solved it, but then ran out of time hunting for the cache itself! It was in a creekside forest and there were about a billion perfect places for a cache, which I would have loved to thoroughly investigate. Well, maybe next time I’m in Sydney I can try again.

At any rate, apparently some folks get frustrated with this sort of cache, yet still want to claim a find for it. Thus has come into being the term “battleshipping”, in which you try to indirectly pinpoint the puzzle cache without solving the puzzle. You do this by attempting to place caches of your own in the general vicinity (which is usually given by the fake coordinates of the puzzle cache). The gods of geocaching.com prevent two caches from being placed closer than 528 feet (161 m) together. So if you try to place a cache too close to the “true” cache location, your cache should be rejected. I don’t know if this actually works (GeoLex claims that cache reviewers will notice this kind of behavior and flag it), but the term makes me laugh.

I also laughed when I learned that the zig-zag path of the final approach to a cache is called the geocacher’s drunken bee dance. So apt!

Because this is the Internet, geocaching acronyms are numerous. There’s the well motivated CITO (cache-in-trash-out), GZ (ground zero, where the cache is), FTF (the person first-to-find a cache), TFTC (“thanks for the cache!”), DNF (“did not find :(“), and TNLNSL (“took nothing, left nothing, signed log”) — because one of the fun aspects of geocaching can be to find “loot” in the cache and swap it for some of your own. Me, I get enough fun out of just finding the thing. :)

And of course, there’s TOTT, which is what sent me hunting for a lexicon in the first place. It stands for “tool of the trade”, which apparently can be any sort of tool needed to access or open the cache. Not knowing ahead of time which tool is needed adds to the challenge.

But my favorite acronym (which I just now learned!) is YAPIDKA: Yet Another Park I Didn’t Know About. One of the greatest things about this hobby is that it leads you to little nooks you might never have discovered otherwise—sometimes in your own hometown!

Henry David Thoreau keeps a fun and thought-provoking blog, based on his diaries. A recent entry caught my eye with its use of a word that was new to me: hypaethral. This adjective describes something that is open to the air, as a building lacking a roof. Thoreau’s use of it here is amusingly metaphorical:

“I thought that one peculiarity of my ‘Week’ was its hypaethral character, to use an epithet applied to those Egyptian temples which are open to the heavens above, under the ether. I thought that it had little of the atmosphere of the house about it, but might wholly have been written, as in fact it was to a considerable extent, out-of-doors. It was only in a late period in writing it, as it happened, that I used any phrases implying that I lived in a house or lived a domestic life. I trust it does not smell [so much] of the study and library, even of the poet’s attic, as of the fields and woods; that it is a hypaethral or unroofed book, lying open under the ether and permeated by it, open to all weathers, not easy to be kept on a shelf.” — Henry David Thoreau, June 29, 1851

I like the idea of a book without a roof, one that would be hard to keep on a shelf, and one that would bring a taste of all the outdoors to any who passed near it. And many’s the day I’ve wished (though lacking the word) that my own life were more hypaethral — that I might look up from my computer and see the sky arching in dazzling blue above, or, later, feel the flickering chatter of stars rain down on me from the dusky twilight. The reminder to look up, to elevate our attention, to imagine the vastness of what lies outside our 12-foot ceilings and plaster and paint, is always a welcome one. Thank you, Thoreau!

In the course of reading a delightful book called Lost Japan, I came across the term hapax legomenon. It defines a word that occurs only once, uniquely, within the written record of a given language, or other large body of writing (the Greek term literally means “once said”). While being interesting for their rarity, such words also present an often insoluble puzzle: if that single occurrence does not also include a definition, then later readers may never be able to determine its meaning. Alex Kerr, the author of Lost Japan, cites examples in Japanese of the form “The vessel shone with the color X,” where X is the hapax legomenon. We’ll never know what that color was.

But hapax legomena are not restricted to Japanese. The wikipedia article provides several other examples. I think my favorite is “flother,” a pre-1900 English word for snowflake that appeared once, in an 1275 manuscript (apparently titled “The XI Pains of Hell”, which seems a curious location for a flother). Except that now that I (and wikipedia) have committed it to the written record, perhaps it has mutated into a dis legomenon (“twice said”), or even a tris legomenon. A google search returns over 16,000 hits for “flother,” including many uses of it as a proper name, and a few pages (like this one) pointing out its hapaxity. Google also claims no hits for “hapaxity.” Could I have coined a hapax legomenon myself?

In the process of reviewing some helpfully provided word lists, in preparation for the spelling bee, I encountered some new words (a nice side effect!). Here they are:

• cenacle: a group of people, as in a discussion or literary group (hey, like my book club!)
• ballottement: a palpatory technique for detecting or examining a floating object in the body
• gallimaufry: a confused jumble of things (can be applied to food, e.g., hash or ragout) — this one wasn’t from studying pre-bee, but from Tim post-bee. Awesome word!

I also came across a few words I probably would have misspelled, prior to this refresher. I’m recording them here in hopes this will help me remember them correctly in the future!

• barbiturate: for some reason, I didn’t know it had an r in it
• bellwether: not -weather
• bouillon: not boullion
• cantaloupe: not -ope
• cemetery: not -ary
• corollary: one r, two l’s
• correlate: two r’s, one l
• dispensable: not -ible
• guerrilla: two r’s, two l’s
• minuscule: not miniscule!
• mischievous: apparently mischievious is not a word!
• occasion: not occaison (I still don’t get why I always misspell this one. I guess it is my occasional heel)
• perseverance: not -ence
• sacrilegious: i and e inverted from their placement in “religious”, likely because the word doesn’t actually derive from “religious”, but instead stealing-of (legere) sacred things (sacri-).
• sergeant: not sa-

On May 3, I drove down to Long Beach to enter the (a?) National Adult Spelling Bee. Many of the contestants gathered at a local coffee shop beforehand to socialize, which was fun and helped everyone relax a little. (It also made for some unusual entertainment, because in this crowd, as soon as I introduced myself, they all wanted to see if they could guess the spelling of my name. About half could.)

At 2 p.m., all 45 contestants filed into the choir seats at the Bay Shore Church, and the rounds began. The words initially were reasonably easy, then noticeably jumped in difficulty after rounds 5 and 10. I spelled words… and more words… and somehow managed to make it all the way to the final round, over two hours later, in which it was just me and a guy who’d flown in for the Bee from Arlington, Virginia!

Here are the words I was given to spell (plus 3 more I can’t recall):

• incubate
• analyze
• influenza
• septic
• connoisseur
• espalier
• malefic
• arrhythmia
• vitriol
• salmagundi: a new one on me! It’s a kind of French salad, but can be used metaphorically to describe a miscellaneous collection.
• portmanteau
• misprision: another new one for me (whee, I guessed right!). Literally, an error or mistake (or misunderstanding); in legal circles, it refers to a deliberate deception.
• louche
• lactiferous

And in the end, my final word was “latkes” (round 18). I probably should have known this word, but didn’t process the fact that it was plural, and guessed “latkis” (which was how it was pronounced). And then I was out! My competitor got “cumshaw” (?!) and spelled it correctly, and thereby won the Bee, quite deservedly. By that point, I’d gotten farther than I’d ever hoped, so I was thrilled anyway. They took our pictures and posted them at the Adult Spelling Bee website.

Aside from the two new words above, I also learned several words while listening to others either spell or fail to spell. These included abomasum (the fourth stomach of a ruminant), anthophilous (flower-loving, as in insects), spavin (a swelling; I thought it ended in an ‘e’ since I’ve only seen it in adjective form, spavined), petiole (stalk), colcannon (Irish dish with potatoes and cabbage), deuteragonist (second place to the protagonist), carnassial (carnivore tooth), banausic (mundane, for technical work — I am totally adopting this one for use on the job), and risorgimento (Italian movement for independence in the late 1800’s). Any of these (except deuteragonist) would likely have taken me out earlier, reminding me of the element of luck in this game!

After the Bee, I also got a chance to visit the beach, and see kite-surfing for the first time, and sample exotic Lebanese food, including raw lamb, chicken kefta, salty yogurt, a grape juice/orange blossom/pine nut concoction, and the Lebanese version of baklava (baklawe?). All in all, it was my favorite kind of day: one full of new words and new experiences!