Epeolatry and Graphorrhea and Lots of "K" Words

After working through the 900 or so words from the 2005 Bee, I decided I needed a more systematic way to master difficult-to-spell words, as well as to prepare myself for the 2007 Senior Bee (to be held in Cheyenne in June). So, after corresponding with Scott Firebaugh (Kokomo, IN) and finding a good list online, I decided I needed to work through the 23,000+ list of words put out by the Scripps Howard folk to prepare the kids for their bee. These 23,000 words, derived from the Webster's Third New International (the "Unabridged"; 1993; revised 2002) are broken down into three "sub" lists--words used frequently in the bees, moderately frequently, and infrequently. What I have decided to do is to work through these 23,000--making "sub-lists" of the words that either are new to me or are those which catch my attention for some reason. I have completed about 1/2 of the task to date. I think my "sub-list" will consist of about 3,000 difficult words, which I will then proceed (and am now already proceeding) to learn. This provides me with endless fascination and inspiration, because I feel that the words usher me into the secrets of their worlds, worlds about which I may know very little until I meet the word. I know I love words, but I may be in danger of falling into what Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr called epeolatry.

Epeolatry is, literally, the "worship of words" (epos is Greek for "word" and latreuo is "worship"). Holmes said in 1860: "Time, time only, can gradually wean us from our Epeolatry, or word-worship, by spiritualizing our ideas of the thing signified." But, I think I really do agree with Dr. Holmes; I don't just worship words; I want to know the worlds behind the words. Every time I learn a new word, especially if it is an object of human activity, I am humbled, because I think of how many people have spent so much time developing expertise on something about which I know nothing.

And then, as I study the words, I write. But by writing so much I might run into another difficulty. To use an image from Greek mythology, I might avoid the Scylla of epeolatry only to run against the Charybdis of graphorrhea. The Unabridged has a listing for graphorrhea, though it is absent from the Century, the OED, and the Collegiate. Graphorrhea may be defined as "a symptom of motor excitement consisting in continual and incoherent writing." Although I am willing to accept this definition of the term, I note that the literal meaning for the word is just "running on at the pen"--i.e., the practice of a person who just can't seem to stop writing.

Actually, the classic term for this kind of writing seems to be graphomania. Attested in the early part of the 19th century, graphomania can be defined as a person "with an insatiable desire to write, though he has nothing to write about except his own mental and moral ailments." I note with interest that the OED has the word graphomania, though it doesn't have graphorrhea, while the situation is precisely the reverse with the Unabridged. I wonder if they occupy the same meaning field. In any case, I hope that these essays are never just the incoherent ramblings of a man who has to write something; I would like each one to help us learn.

Speaking of Learning...

So, here is the problem I encounter in studying the 23,000 words from the Unabridged. I will narrow that list down to about 3,000 of the most difficult words (for me). But, I am finding that most of the words that are most difficult for me are not in the Collegiate dictionary--the one used for the Senior Bee in June. Thus, I am actually spending more time learning words I don't strictly need to know. Let me illustrate this by looking at the 26 words beginning with "k" in the "moderate frequency" list that I need to study more closely, because I was not very familiar with them. Here is the list of those words, from the "moderate frequency" list:

"kallikak, kamelaukion, kamik, karyogamy, kathak, keitloa, kemancha, kench, kentledge, khatun, kiekie, kier, kilderkin, kirimon, kirtle, klezmorim, klipspringer, klister, klompen, koftgari, koshare, koto, kraken, krakowiak, kuru and kyoodle.

After looking these all up and putting down nice definitions for each one of the term, I not only note how much of the diversity of the world is represented by these words (for example, koshare is a Pueblo Indian clown society, while kiekie is a New Zealand climbing shrub, while khatun is a woman of rank in Muslim countries, and kraken is a fabulous Scandanavian sea monster) but I tried to see how many of these also appeared in the Collegiate. I was distressed to find that only nine of the twenty-six words also appeared in the Collegiate, the dictionary I need to learn. These are:

karyogamy, kentledge, kilderkin, kirtle, klezmorim, klister, koto, kraken and kuru.

The Collegiate list is rather truncated. I so much wish I had learned the word "kyoodle," for example, before today. It was invented in 1922 by Sinclair Lewis, in Babbit: "Now I guess the folks in this man's town will quit listening to all this kyoodling [i.e., yapping, barking, screeching] from behind the fence." John Steinbeck picked up the word in Tortilla Flat thirteen years later: "The dogs..sought out a rabbit and went kyoodling after it."

Conclusion

Let me close with one of the more interesting words from this list: kuru. It is defined in the OED as "a progressive and fatal degenerative disease of the brain which is endemic in an area of the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea and characterized by ataxia (note--ataxia isn't in the OED!) and tremor." Ataxia does appear, however, in the Century and is defined as an irregularity in the function of the body or in the course of a disease. I note that the Unabridged definition of kuru is more extensive than that of the OED:

"rare progressive fatal encephalopathy that is caused by a slow virus, resembles Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, is characterized esp. by proliferation of astrocytes and changes in the brain tissue, and occurs among tribesmen in eastern New Guinea."

One other point is made by the Collegiate. It mentions that these tribesmen:

"engaged in a form of ritual cannibalism..."

Doesn't the mystery thicken as you read one defintion after another? It shows us that the dictionaries are only the slightest introduction to the wild and wonderful world in which we live, and that some of them mention more inflammatory things (i.e., cannibalism--leading to the question of whether this "primitive" practice can be the "cause" of this deadly disease) and others conveniently ignore those things. Don't ever think that a "dictionary" is "objective," whatever that might mean....

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