Portland Spelling Bee--Difficult Words

The night before I headed down to Southern CA to watch the PAC-10 basketball tournament, I decided to stop in on the weekly Portland bee, which normally has about 15 spellers competing for gift certificates and the chance to participate in the quarterly championship (April 7), where a cash prize of $100 is at stake. On this occasion I didn't win; the little word epyllion tripped me up on the last round of the competition. Yet, as is often the case in life, you learn more when you make mistakes than when you get everything right.

There were several difficult words in the last few rounds of the competition, and the purpose of this essay is to review about 15 of them. They are: gallinazo, motitation, obvelation, dactyloscopy, emanomenter, lavabo, smaragdine, parandrus, galenical, noosphere, niobium, frumentaceous, neophiliac, epyllion and heterodyned. These weren't the only hard words, but they should give us enough to begin well.

Where to Begin?

1. Let's begin with gallinazo (guy ih NA tso), a word that hides lots of potential confusion in it. When you first hear it pronounced (it is an American vulture, by the way), you might be tempted to think of "Guyana" and spell it like that. But the word is derived ultimately from the Spanish word for "hen," gallina. Why a vulture would be named after a hen is confusing to me, unless, as the pictures show, it tends to look like one. We know it popularly as the "turkey vulture," yet Darwin and others called it the gallinazo.

2. Let's move to something more easily visualized: dactyloscopy. It is the old, or better said--the original, word for the study or examination of fingerprints. The word first originated in 1908; Here is an interesting sentence from 1921: "Poroscopy is infinitely more fruitful in results than the one known by the name of dactyloscopy..." By the way, poroscopy, a word first used in 1913, suggests a method of identifying a person from a fingerprint by matching the characteristic pattern of pores on a finger to the marks on the print. Thus, it looks at pores rather than ridges...

3-4. A neophiliac is someone who loves new things. I don't know why a haemo/hemophiliac is one who bleeds easily, when the underlying Greek word philia means "affection" or "love," but I know that neophilia is the love of new things. It is, appropriately, a fairly new word, dating back only to 1942, though neophilia was coined in 1899 and neophily, which means the same as neophilia, in 1932. Niobium is really not a difficult word--it is simply a chemical element, atomic number 41, which was discovered, or at least named, in 1844. As the OED says, it is a "transition metal[], occurring in tantalite, columbite, and other minerals, and is used in superconducting alloys." The actual origin and naming of niobium is more complex, as this web page describes. It is named after Niobe, the daughter of Tantalus, because the element had to be differentiated from tantalum by H. Rose in the early 1840s. I always think of Niobe weeping and frozen; I wonder if there is any connection to that aspect of the myth...

5. Then, there is the word motitation, which really isn't a difficult word to spell but because it is obsolete (the OED tells us so) and has the first "t" pronounced like a "d," it is easy to miss it. A motitation is a "quivering movement." In Bulwer's 1649 Pathomyotomia (itself an interesting word. The OED has pathomyotomist, a person who studies the muscles--myo-- concerned in the expression of emotions--patho), we have: "If you rest a trembling Hand upon a cushion, you shall soon stay the trembling, and free it from that motitation." Good words all.

6. I think the most interesting word of the entire bee was parandrus, which no one wanted to spell (in Rounds 3-5 the spellers are given a choice of two words to spell). Finally, Michael, who sometimes seems to have a spelling death wish, chose it and misspelled it; the rest of us gave a huge sigh of relief and thanked Michael for taking one for the team. The word appears neither in the OED nor the Century. A "google search" only yields a few hundred references, but the first one (here) gives us all the information we want to know. A parandrus, also known as the tarandrus or tharandus, is an ancient/medieval beast which could conceal itself by changing its appearance. Here is Pliny's description:

"The tarandrus, too, of the Scythians, changes its color, but this is the case with none of the animals which are covered with hair, except the lycaon of India, which is said to have a mane on the neck...The tarandrus is the size of the ox; its head is larger than that of the stag, and not very unlike it; its horns are branched, its hoofs cloven, and its hair as long as that of the bear. Its proper color, when it thinks proper to return to it, is like that of the ass. Its hide is of such extreme hardness, that it is used for making breastplates. When it is frightened, this animal reflects the color of all the trees, shrubs, and flowers, or of the spots in which it is concealed; hence it is that it is so rarely captured," Natural History, 8.52.

A footnote remarks that Cuvier said this account is from an anonymous ancient treatise and from Theophrastus; and that it was probably, in the first instance, derived from an account which the ancients possessed of the reindeer, the hair of which becomes nearly white in the winter and, in the summer, brown or gray. Others suggest that the tarandrus was the elk..." The OED lists the word tarand/tarandre. The Century has it listed as tarandus, from the Greek word for a horned animal, perhaps the reindeer.

You have just entered into the world of identification of ancient beasts, a task made more difficult by our difficulty in knowing exactly what the ancients meant by the words they used. Here, it seems like almost no one refers to this chameleon as the parandrus--except, of course, the Unabridged dictionary. Which makes it a great candidate for a spelling bee....

The next essay "finishes" these words.

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