2005 National Spelling Bee XII

1. Epicede, word # 229, is not really a difficult word to spell but it ought to be noted as a helpful word. The OED informs us that it is the Anglicized form of epicedium (who decides which Latin or Greek term stays in its 'non-Anglicized' form when coming into English?), and means, quite simply, "a funeral ode." Therefore something that is epicedian is elegiac or, like Joan Baez's voice, funereal. The word is derived from two Greek words--epi, meaning "upon," and kaydos, meaning "care," especially with respect to funeral observance. While speaking about music or odes at funerals, why not learn the word for its counterpart at a marriage celebration? Such an ode is an epithalamium, where the word thalamos means "bridal chamber." Shakespeare could write in Timon of Athens, "Sing us some sweete epithalamion." You don't really need to know Greek in order to know English; you just have to know Greek words.

2. Something that is Hyblaean, word # 240, comes from Hybla in Sicily. But, as you have already surmised, there is much more to tell about this word. Hybla was the place celebrated in classical antiquity for its honey; therefore something Hyblaean was "honied, sweet, mellifluous." Now the word can take off for us, can't it? It stimulates the poetic imagination, so that one not only can speak of "Hyblaean swarms" of bees, but of "Hyblaean eloquence" or a person's "Hyblaean voice." A Google search yields few apparances, and many of them have a geographical reference.

3. A culicidologist is someone who studies gnats. I don't know how any 13 year-old could have gotten this word, # 241, correct. The OED doesn't have it but, interestingly enough, it has culicicide, though the Unabridged has this latter term as culicide, dropping off the second (or first?) ci. Because you know that ci has to do with killing things (parricide means killing your parents, for instance), culicicide or culicide refers to an insecticide for destroying gnats and mosquitoes. A culex, in Latin, is (you guessed it) a gnat. If someone is a culicicidal maniac he is obsessed with the idea of knocking off gnats. I just made that one up. I wonder if I walked into Joe's Home & Garden shop and asked for the most potent culicicidal agent they had what their reaction would be. One of the only references I could find online to anyone who admitted being a culicidologist was when Carl Schreck, a "mosquito expert or culicidologist" with the USDA said, with "duh-like" gravity, "No other insect causes more discomfort" (than mosquitoes). Do we need culicidologists to tell us that?

4. Let's try to move quickly now (oops, I won't be successful). A mwami, word #244, is a monarch or ruler in either of the former African kingdoms of Ruanda and Urundi. Well, if the Washington Post can bring maquiladora, a Mexican-Spanish word, into English, I suppose that the 19th century British explorer and author Richard Burton could properly say: "The great Mwami or Sultan of Ujiji in 1858-59 was Rusimba." Rusimba probably could have been more effective as President of the United States in that year than James Buchanan... 5. viejitos, word # 246, is obviously derived from the Spanish word for "old men," and is defined as "a comic dance of the Tarascan Indians performed by young men dressed and masked as old men." How this made it into English must be a mystery to almost everyone.

However, let's pause for a moment and imagine what is happening with language. As our world is becoming more interdependent and more unified technologically, there is what you might call a "two-way" movement of words. We in the USA export all kinds of words to the rest of the world (email, remote control, google (verb) etc.), but they send us many of their words too. How so? Well, we travel to their lands, pick up their customs or food, bring them back here and then begin to speak about them. In a sense, what the 21st century is doing in language is to reverse Babel. In Gen. 11 God "descended" to see his proud creatures building a tower, was offended, and decided to create confusion of tongues (Babel). Now, by bringing words as diverse as maquiladora or mwami or viejitos or hundreds of other terms into English, we are reversing the effects of Gen. 11. Hm...maybe God will have to descend and create another confusion of tongues. Well, as I think of it, we humans aren't doing such a bad job after all in creating the fruit of confused tongues--tension, wars, and the associated international intrigues and distrust that comes with it. Now, let's return to words.

6. We have two words, sillar (word # 247) and 7. maar (word # 252) which come from vulcanology. Sorry, Spock fans, I am referring to the scientific study of volcanos and their remnants. If you seek an impenetrable definition of the former, you can do no better than the OED: "An ignimbrite or volcanic tuff that has not become indurated by welding." Ah, here is the 1948 scholarly excerpt which first brought the word into English: "There has been a tendency to call all such deposits 'welded tuffs'....[which such deposits?]...For those in which induration is primarily the result of recrystallization, and for those in which the fragments have little cohesion, another term is desirable. The local term 'sillar'..., commonly used in the Arequipa region [in Peru,] has been applied in the present paper." And because of Professor Fenner, we now have it in spelling bees, though it was spelling correctly by Albert Chung of Victoria, TX in 2005. The Wikipedia stub on the subject simply said it is the white volcanic stone from which many buildings in Arequipa (2nd largest Peruvian city) are made. I guess you sometimes just have to take a trip to see what people mean.

A maar, marred by a speller in the 2005 Bee, is a "volcanic crater that is produced by an explosion in an area of low relief, is generally more or less circular, and often contains a lake, pond, or marsh." Maars received their name because that is what the natives of Prussia (Eifel region) called these bodies of water when English-speaking people first began writing about them in the early 19th century. Pictures of these lakes abound on the Net. I discovered that "maar" is also can be used as a conjunction to indicate that Afrikans speech is being reported. Wow, the engaging and surprising diversity of things...

Let's conclude with 8. boiserie and 9. tabetisol. We can see in the former something to do with wood, and indeed, boiserie is "wainscoting" or "wooden panelling." We borrowed it from the French in the mid-19th centry and have never given it back. The Wikipedia article gives a few pictures of these elaborately carved wooden walls or panels. Then, we have word # 250, tabetisol. It, like its "meaning-neighbor" pergelisol is really a word that never should have been invented. Why? Well, here is the story of pergelisol, which has been used in the Bee and will continue to be so used I am sure. In the mid-1940s, someone was trying to create a verb from the newly-coined word permafrost. The scientists who invented pergelisol said that it was "impossible to make a verbal noun from 'permafrost.'" But, this is patently ludicrous. We could have "permafrosted" or "permafrosting." We have those, as a matter of fact. But this guy wanted to etch his name permanently into the dictionary (and probably into the consciousness of unwary spellers) and invented pergelisol to express the same concept because he figured the word could be more easily made into a verb and converted into other European languages. Huh? Well, there you have a new word, friends. Well, the OED folks probably realized they had been "had" by letting pergelisol into their dictionary, and they haven not allowed tabetisol to cross the sacred threshold. But the Unabridged shows no such compunctions. They blissfully accepted tabetisol (from the Latin tabere, meaning "to melt") to mean: "unfrozen ground above, within, or below the pergelisol." Sounds like that potentially includes quite a bit of land, doesn't it? Sounds also like a useless word, which is probably why just about the only attestations of its use in Google are either in spelling bees or Chinese-English dictionaries. While you are figuring that one out, I will be doing something else...

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