National Spelling Bee--2005-- More Words

1. Pilpul. Let me personalize this word because I met the young lady who spelled it correctly in 2005. She is Stacia Firebaugh from Kokomo, IN. I met her on June 16, 2006 National Senior Spelling Bee in Cheyenne. No, she hadn't put on 40 years in one year; she was there to support her Dad, Scott, who competed in the Senior Bee. Scott did well, and he will do better in future years I know. I am proud to have met her and am impressed that she sailed through Round 2 by spelling pilpul correctly. The word comes from post-biblical Hebrew and means "to turn to and fro" and was especially associated with rabbinical argumentation. Though leguleian primarily refers to underhanded or pettifogging legal practitioners, pilpul refers both to the ingenuity of the rabbis and their penchant for quibbling. But, as any who have been intensely invovled in close textual study of sacred texts know, there is often a fine line, or no line really, between brilliant argumentation and petty quibbling. Or, to put it differently, an argument that is brilliant to one person can be perceived as cavilling by another. Nevetheless, the first attestation of pilpul in English, in 1894, associated it with positive things: "The astonishing facility of ingenious disquisition on the basis of Talmud (Pilpul), attributed to Polak, which attained its highest perfection in Poland, proceeded from a native in Poland." But the word can profitably be loosed from the Jewish context, I believe, and describe the dialectical machinations of anyone. The context would determine whether the reference was intended to be positive or negative.

2. Sciamachy is the last word I want to deal with at this point from the 2005 Bee. The first "c" is silent, and so it is pronounced SI a mak e. The Greek word skia means "shadow" and so sciamachy is fighting with shadows or "a sham fight for exercise or practice." The Century also adds that it suggests a futile combat with an imaginary enemy. So much of our communication rests on shades of meaning among words. We fight over words. "You call me a tyrant?" Thus we can say that to avoid sciamachy, both sides in an argument should be as clear as they can be on the terms of debate. The irony of this word, however, is that even though it can be used to encourage clarity of terms (let's not just fight over things whose meaning we can't agree on..), the word itself might not be crystal clear. Can we call a "practice round" at something a sciamachy? Or is its better, if not exclusive, reference to a sort of imaginary fight? To fight over words is logomachy. Perhaps we should confine it to someone who fights imaginary foes, a sort of quixotic person. But its meaning remains a bit..er...shadowy. Even its spelling is shadowy, since all the attestations of it in the OED are spelled either skiomachy or skiamachy. Yet, it lists sciamachy as the preferred spelling. How do you account for that? Well, I love the 1637 quotation: "Least thou shouldst perhaps think I affected a Sciomachy or Umbratilous skirmish." Yes, I love this because I realize that sciamachy is the Greek for the concept and umbratilous skirmish the "Latin-English" form. Something umbratilous is "shadowy, unreal; faint." Umbratilous unlocks a slew of words beginning with "umbr..." but I am not going to go there now. There will be time.

My Words

Let's now move to a few words, done more quickly, that I came upon while looking up all these wonderful Spelling Bee words. While looking up dactyloscopy, my eye fell across the Century page to:

4. Daddock (Daddocky). Daddock is a noun and means "the heart or body of a tree thoroughly rotten." A quotation is: "The great red daddocks lay in the green pastures where they had lain year after year, crumbling away gradually..." Something that is daddocky, therefore, is rotten, like a decayed tree. But then my eye wandered down the page, and I found "dade," which isn't listed as a County in Florida but a verb meaning "to walk slowly and hesitatingly, like a child in leading-strings." Then I thought, "My, when did 'leading strings' come in and go out of our language?" It would be great to have search engines or capabilities that would easily tell you that. Maybe they already exist and I just don't know about them. Then, I permitted myself the joy of one more word: "dadian: the title borne by the governor or prince of Mingrelia." Of course, I had to discover something about Mingrelia, and I learned it was also known as Samegrelo and is a "historic province in the western part of the republic of Georgia, formerly also known as Odishi." I didn't know, for example, that the first President of the Country of Georgia after independence from the former Soviet Union was Dr. Zviad Gamsakhurdia (1939-1993), a Mingrelian. So many things to learn, if you just stop and listen to the world and to people.

5. Glaum. I don't know exactly how I came across this word, but it is a verb meaning "to snatch at a thing" or "to make threatening movements." All the attestations are from Scottish texts, so that is probably its natural home. But it made me interested in seeing how this might be related to glom, such as in the statement to "glom onto" something. Indeed, the OED tells us that glom is a variant of glaum and means "to steal; grab; snatch." Its first attestation is from a sort of underworld context in 1907: "We..discovered that our hands were gloved. 'Where'd ye glahm 'em?' I asked. 'Out of an engine-cab,' he answered." Thus to glahm/glom at first meant to steal, but by the mid-1960s the word glom could take on the meaning that is popular today--to hold tightly or grab.

6. I was inspired to do something with papilionaceous because of its literal and figurative meaning. The underlying classical Latin word is papilio which means "butterfly." Something papilionaceous, then will be "of or relating to a butterfly." It also has a significance in botany where a plant or flower has a corolla arranged in a form resembling a butterfly. Or, and I like this one best, it is "suggestive of a butterfly; showy; frivolous; capricious; erratic." Though most of the references are, predicably, to females, one from 1955 attributed Ray Bradbury's great reputation to his "papilionaceous prose." Try that one on for size. Rather than writing trenchant, or flowery, or lapidary prose, one might be producing, probably without knowing it, papilionaceous prose. But there is one more thing to say about this word, and that is that it is derived from the same word as pavilion. This derivation is helpful to know because it provides us a pleasant picture. A pavilion is a covered building, and the "hood" of the butterfly when spread out looks like a pavilion. Hence the name papilio. I think I like the phrase "papilionaceous frivolity" or "papilionaceous ostentation" to describe some people's actions or lives. These phrases are a first on the Internet.

7. I am not getting through my list completely, but let's end this essay with demivierge. I think I was attracted to it because I like the word demiurge. Demiurge was one of the Bee words, so I found my eyes wandering down the page. Its meaning made me chuckle. Picking up on the 1894 title of a French book (Les demi-vierges by M. Prevost), and on the concept of "halves" suggested by "demi," a demivierge is "a woman (esp. a young woman) of doubtful reputation or suspected unchastity, who is not a virgin except in the strict physiological sense of the word." Though he wasn't the first to use it in English, DH Lawrence used it well: "I hope, Connie, that you won't let circumstances force you into being a demi-vierge." Arthur Koestler injected a figurative meaning for the term in 1951 when he said: "We call demi-vierges a certain category of intellectuals who flirt with revolution and violence, while trying to remain chaste liberals at the same time."

Words just explode with meaning and encourage us to develop future usages. But you need to take some time to get to know them. I think I will return to the Bee now, saving some of my other words for later.

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