From Praseodymium to Lipograms

A number of words that I included, to my shame, on my 2700-word wordlist are chemical elements. I say "to my shame," because even though I don't expect myself to have memorized the periodic table of elements, I should recognize the elements when I see them and be able to wax eloquently about their properties. In the quest to know "all the words," then, this will have to be a goal. Nevertheless, four that made it on my list were praseodymium, technetium, terbium, and thallium. My list ignores europium (An 63, Aw 151.96), germanium (An 32, Aw 72.59) and francium (An 87, Aw 223), which were on the CWL but can easily be spelled. Let's just take a moment on praseodymium (An 59, Aw 140.9077). Its name comes from the Greek, and means "green" and "twin," though the actual Greek word for "twin" is didymos.

This website tells the fascinating story of the discovery and naming of several elements. CG Mosander (1797-1856) lived with the Swedish chemist Berzelius and his wife for many years. He partially separated cerite, a mineral, with hot dilute nitric acid. The oxide remaining he called ceria, already a familiar name, but then, at the urging of Berzelius, renamed it Lanthanum. Lanthanum now has An 57 on the Periodic Table, and is derived from the Greek verb lanthano, meaning "to lie hidden." In fact, this lanthanum was not taken out of the cerite for 36 years after cerite was discovered--thus the meaning of the name. It lay "hidden" for 36 years. It is almost like the Biblical Hebrews naming place names, isn't it? Here is Gilgal and there Ebenezer...

Well, in 1841 Mosander separated a new rose-colored oxide from lanthana. The element within the oxide he called Didymium (twin) because of its similar properties to Lanthanum. Then, two years later, he showed that yttria from which all this ceria, lanthana and didyma had been removed, still contained at least three other earths, things that he called yttria, erbia and terbia. Then, in 1884, an Austrian scholar, who had been studying Didymium for many years, identified two more elements after fractionating ammonium didymium nitrate. He proposed the names of Praseodymium (An 59) and Neodymium (An 60) for the two new elements.

Isn't this the germ of a fascinating story? I think that the best way to ease into new areas of knowledge where we might not have the technical equipment to understand the nature of scientific claims being made, is to do it biographically and historically. Then, as we gradually increase our knowledge, the world discovered by these scientists becomes open to us. And, in the meantime, we have just learned about seven good words, some of which appear in spelling bees. Let's now abandon chemistry for literary terms.

Ananym and Lipogram

An ananym, formed loosely on the Greek words ana, meaning up or again, and onoma, meaning name, is "the real name written backwards." Thus, the ananym of John Collard's last name is "Dralloc." The word should more properly be anonym, but that word, meaning "of unknown name," was already taken. Thus, an ananym is not just a nom de plume or a pseudonym but rather a specialized form of this. Dr. Seuss, whose real name was Theodore Geisel, wrote some children's books under the name Theo LeSieg (you do the letters). Or, more in our day, Harpo Productions, founded by Oprah Winfrey, is just "Oprah" spelled backwards. It is an ananym. There you have it. I am sure you can figure out lots of other ones.

A lipogram, from the Greek meaning "missing letter," is a writing in which one letter is dropped. That is, it is a kind of writing with constraints, which would not allow an author to use an "i" or "e" or "o" for the length of a paragraph, chapter or even entire work. This Wikipedia article provides some examples of works written as lipograms. I can't really imagine why anyone would spend serious time writing like this, even though those who do it find it to be something of a game. You would think that with cancer, financial disaster, problems with kids and other lurking issues out there that people wouldn't be looking for ways to make their lives harder. But maybe they are.

An acquaintance of mine, Stephen Shore, who has Asperger's Syndrome but is completing a doctorate at Boston University, says that living with Asperger's or high-functioning autism is like trying to compose every sentence you speak without using the letter "n." We tried that exercise in one of his seminars; such a practice makes us all hesitate before we speak.

Xystus/Xysti

I have always loved words beginning with "x," even though I missed the word "xebec" in one of my early spelling bees. But this word comes from the Greek word for something scraped or polished, and describes a long covered portico or court used for athletic exercises. Thus, the pavement is "scraped" so that the athletes can give their best performance. In Roman times it could refer to an open colonnade or a walkway planted with trees. The common feature, however, was an area that was much longer than it was wide. From the ancient world we know that the Stoics were named from the "stoa poikile," the vary-colored portico or roofed colonnade where Zeno and other early Stoic philosophers held forth.

While thinking of porticoes and colonnades, I ran across another word in my list, tetrastoon, which is a courtyard having open colonnades on each of its four sides. Taking apart the word we have "tetra" (four" and "stoon," which is the neuter of tetrastoos, having four porticos). There you have it. Makes spelling kind of fun and easy, doesn't it? As one of my professors used to say, "Once you learn all the Semitic languages, you can learn any one of them easily." So, I say unto you, 'Once you learn all the words, any of them is easy to spell and understand.'

Finishing with Shamastvo

Words ending in "stvo" are Russian. The first such word I ran into a few years ago was "zemstvo," which was "an elective district or provincial council in Russia for purposes of local government, created by Alexander II in 1864." Well, the word "shamanstvo" seems to have originated in 1895, in the title of V.M. Mikhailovskii's work on Shamanism in Siberia. Not exactly an article that is leaping of the presses now, I believe. In any case, Nabokov, as could be expected, picked up the term, and then the Canadian author Robertson Davies used it to describe the writing of Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac, Anthony trollope, Evelyn Waugh, and Daniel Defoe. It means "the enchanter quality." If someone in the Yiddish world has "chutzpah," that person has a combination of boldness and insolence. If some one has shamanstvo, that person has an ability to create a magic world. I think it is a wonderfully useful term, though unfortunately neither the OED nor the Unabridged has it. All the more reason for celebrating its virtues here.

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