What I Learned Today

On a lark, I signed up last weekend for the National Adult Spelling Bee, to be held this Sunday in Long Beach. The website helpfully provides a list of words that were used in last year’s competition as well as an interactive online spelling bee with which you can practice. So far I’ve compiled a hefty list of words on which I would have failed, had I been called upon to spell them. (I note there is a difference between recognizing a word as printed and translating from the word spoken aloud to its printed form — so there are words that I could read but might not be able to spell aloud.) Let’s hope none of them make an appearance Sunday, or that I remember their proper spellings!

• souk: an Arab marketplace or bazaar
• escutcheon: a shield or emblem bearing a coat of arms
• weir: a low dam built across a river to regulate its flow
• vichyssoise: a soup made with potatoes, leeks, and cream
  
• mahout: a person who tends an elephant

• etouffee: a spicy Cajun stew made with vegetables and seafood
• axolotl: a Mexican salamander
• adrenergic: activated by or capable of releasing epinephrine (are you kidding me?)
• tremolo: a wavering effect in a musical tone
• gabion: a wirework container filled with rock, broken concrete, or other material, used to construct dams
• … and so on…

I’m also concerned about homonyms. What if “philter” or “burgher” or “mien” comes up and it doesn’t occur to me to ask for a definition before spelling it? (Oh, whew, the rules indicate that in the case of homonyms, the pronouncer is to state which of the meanings is intended.)

I don’t actually care if I win. My goal is rather more humble: to misspell a word that I genuinely don’t know, instead of misspelling a word because of a stupid mistake, as in my fifth grade spelling bee when I was asked to spell “alcohol” and hastily began with “a-c-” and then stopped, because you can’t correct yourself. Not this time! This time, I will be slain with honor by budgerigar or gangue or rasorial or the like! If all goes well.

Recently, I learned that several words in common use are in fact misbegotten coinages, formed by an imperfect split between the article and the noun.

• “Adder” came from “a nadder”
• “Newt” came from “an ewt”
• “Nickname” came from “an ekename” (an “eke” name was an “extra” name)
• “Nuncle” (now obsolete) came from “mine uncle” (a respectful address)
• “for the nonce” came from “for then anes” (obsolete “the ones”)

This kind of word is referred to as a “misdivision” or (more technically) an improper “metanalysis“; actually, there are lots of terms for this error: rebracketing, juncture loss, junctural metanalysis, false splitting, and refactorization, according to Wikipedia.

The evolution of language (and how we can change right along with it) never ceases to amaze me. I’ll have to keep an eye out for more of these!

I recently finished reading “Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: The Firsthand Experiences of a British Woman in Outback Japan in 1878” (see my review). In addition to inspiring my awe at her fortitude and adventuresome spirit, Isabella Bird also taught me a few words and phrases:

• carbolic acid: The author requested and received permission to visit a newly constructed modern hospital, after which she wrote approvingly of the use of “carbolic acid” as a disinfectant during surgery. It is now known as phenol and no longer used for this purpose (apparently prolonged use irritates the skin), being given up in favor of aseptic techniques.
• conning their lessons: A phrase she used to describe school children studying in the evening. While the modern meaning of “con” refers to deception, an archaic meaning was “to learn by heart.”
• coolie: An “unskilled native laborer”. Ms. Bird uses this to refer to the men pulling her kuruma (wheeled cart), apparently without any sense of insult implied.
• cryptomeria: A conifer (known as ‘sugi’ in Japanese) that appears all over Japan, particularly around temples and shrines (she reports a 40-mile avenue of these trees approaching the shrine at Nikko — I’ll have to look for it myself when I visit!). The sound of the word itself appeals to me. ‘Crypto’, of course, means ‘hidden’ (Latin), but interestingly the other part of the word is from Greek ‘meros’ and means ‘part’, so named because the seeds are hidden by scales.
• Dollond: This is apparently an example of referring to an item by its brand name (like kleenex, band-aid, xerox, etc.). She wrote, “After I was mounted I was on the point of removing my Dollond from the case, which hung on the saddle horn, when a regular stampede occurred, old and young running as fast as they possibly could, children being knocked down in the haste of their elders. Ito [her guide] said that they thought I was taking out a pistol to frighten them, and I made him explain what the object really was, for they are a gentle, harmless people, whom one would not annoy without sincere regret.” She did not, of course, bother to explain to us what it was, as we must already know. Some googling suggests that she was referring to a small telescope or spyglass manufactured by Dollond.
• freshet: This word makes me think of fountains, but apparently it instead refers to a river flood caused by melting snow or rain. These appear frequently in this book, often when the author must ford the flooded streams or is stuck in one hamlet or another due to impassible fords, washed-out bridges, etc.
• plenishings: Another word for furniture or furnishings in a house.
• stretcher: Today, this word has strong invalid connotations, but the author used it to refer to the cot she brought with her in an (unsuccessful) attempt to avoid the rampant fleas (she found that laying out waxed paper around her cot improved its effectiveness significantly).

I’m re-reading The Lord of the Rings for the umpteenth time, and it is such a joy to re-immerse myself in Tolkien’s language–lyrical, visual, and sometimes beyond my ken. In particular, the use of archaic units of measurement has been tripping me up, so I finally looked them up:

league: the distance a man walks in an hour (about three miles, unless you are Aragorn son of Arathorn)

fathom: about six feet, literally “a pair of outstretched arms” (for a full-grown man, presumably)

furlong: a eighth of a mile, but originally used to describe the length of a furrow, which was the long side of a then-standard rectangular acre-plot (the short side was 22 yards or “one chain” wide). Thank you, Wikipedia!

I already knew that “fortnight” was “two weeks” but somehow hadn’t connected it as “fortnight” = “fourteen nights”. Wikipedia’s entry on the FFF System makes for some fun related reading.

I remain stymied by some other words Tolkien uses, though; most are landscape words. I cannot find any reasonable definitions for “hythe” (a place where a boat comes ashore, from context?), “mew” (something on a hill), or “thrawn” (a kind of tree, from context). If you have any hints, please share in the comments. Thanks!

A friend pointed me to FreeRice, a site that donates 20 grains of rice to the UN for every vocabulary analogy you get right. Maybe the ETS (of SAT and GRE fame) should team up with these folks! In the meantime, you can study for your standardized exams and feel warm and fuzzy for your efforts. Or if you’re like me, you’ll get hungry and need to go fix yourself a bowl of rice.

Neat twist: The site doesn’t just run you through a gamut of random words; instead, it adapts to your progress by ratcheting up the difficulty until you start getting words wrong. As a result, I learned several new words today (it shows you the correct answer when you get them wrong):

captious: hypercritical (a lucky guess)

bunco: swindle (another lucky guess)

rodomontade: bluster (what, again?)

icteric: jaundiced (missed that one)

aperient: laxative (ugh!)

.. and so on. Go try it out yourself! Enjoy!