Back to the bee
March 9th, 2014 at 11:43 pm (Vocabulary)
Today I made my annual pilgrimage to the Adult Spelling Bee in Long Beach. I saw several familiar faces amongst the other competitors as I climbed onto the hot, stuffy stage and prepared to do battle with the dictionary.
The first four rounds were pretty approachable:
- fusty
- nimrod
- solstice
- homily
On the 5th round, I was given “hawkshaw,” a word I’d never heard before. I asked for a definition and was told, “a detective.” Hmm. Was it “hockshaw” or “hawkshaw”? I asked for the language of origin and got “U.S. slang.” That clinched it. I figured “hawk” (hunt) was a more likely metaphor for a detective than “hock” (sell) and went with “hawkshaw.” And it was right!
(It turns out that hawkshaw is a reference to a comic strip character named Hawkshaw the Detective.)
On the 6th round, I got “paludal.” Yeah, if you’ve heard of this word before, kudos to you! The definition is “of or relating to a swamp; marshy.” I hesitated. Was it “pa-” or “pe-“? “Pelagic” is a word that refers to the ocean, which is watery. Was that close enough to marshy? What would a “pal-” prefix mean?
I ended up going for “palludal,” which was close, but no cigar. Later I learned that “palus” is Latin for “marsh.” Well, now I know!
That round was quite brutal, and by going out at that point I tied for 6th place with many other spellers (the same place as last year!). Some interesting and challenging words from the remaining rounds (an asterisk means I would have misspelled it) were:
- antimacassar
- primeval
- tetchy
- sanguine
- prurient
- *maquillage
- costive
- reify
- turpitude
- basenji
- degust
- phalanx
- *divagate
- prevenient
- contumacious — the winning word!
I’m already looking forward to next year. :)