At the Rebar--Seattle Spelling Bee VI

Let's continue with speller # 7 in Round 3. She got cyanope, fomorian, galleass/galliass. I think I can move through these three much more quickly, though whenever I start an essay with that optimistic assessment, I get egg on my face. Cyanope, at least as it appears in the Unabridged, is a dumb word. First of all, cyanope only appears in the Unabridged; it is absent from the OED, the Century, the Collegiate. Second, it only has about 160 "Google results" for the term, almost all of which are in gibberish entries. Third, the definition given by the Unabridged really makes no sense. It is: "a person with fair hair and brown eyes." The only problem is that the Greek word cyan, from kuanos, means "dark blue." A cyanometer, for example (word first used in English in 1829, though it appeared as cyanometre in French in 1791), is an instrument for measuring the intensity of the blue of the sky. We in Oregon need one for measuring the grey in the sky, I believe. The OED patiently tells us that the prefix cyano is, in scientific terms, "azure," or "dark-blue." Cyanosis is a disease of blue or livid skin owing to the circulation of imperfectly oxygenated blood. Thus, why, tell me, does every other use of the term "cyan-" in English have reference to blue, but cyanope has reference to brown? Cyanope, literally, means "deep-blue eyed." How can you get "fair hair and brown eyes" from cyanope? End of rant.

You either do or don't know fomorian. In Irish legend, it is a race of pirates or giants, perhaps originally representing the gods of death and darkness. WB Yeats was one of the first to use the term in 1891: "One evening Formorian galleys had entered the Bay of the Red Cataract." I am not sure I understand his sentence. Does it mean the galleys are huge or that there are sort of rostral images of the gods? Here is a site on Celtic mythology that will give you more words than you can imagine.. Finally, galleass/galliass is a very unsatisfactory word, too. The OED defines it as a "heavy, low-built vessel, larger than a galley (does this galley carry Formorians?), impelled both by sail and oars, chiefly employed in war..." The Collegiate only lists galleass. On one occasion I wrote an essay entitled Galleass (I really have nothing better to do with my time), in which I discovered eight ways the word has been spelled. Not bad for a word no one uses anymore...

Speller # 8 and My Words (# 10)

The next speller (# 8) only got one word because she had missed two previously and bowed out on alliaceous. When I was learning trees and flowers last year, I came across the Allium, the onion. Therefore, something alliaceous either pertains to the genus Allium or has the peculiar smell or taste of the onion.

I didn't record the words for speller # 9, using the time, instead, to retreat into myself and relax for my words. My three were enneasyllabic, chiavetta, and lacustrine. I think I got the easy words, don't you? Perhaps they were trying to show their hospitality to me. There are many words beginning with ennea, the Greek word for the number nine. An ennead is a system of nine objects or one of the divisions of Porphyry's collection of the doctrines of Plotinus, so called because each of the six divisions contains nine books. The Enneads of Plotinus is the classical document of Neoplatonism. An enneagon has nine angles; an ennealogy is an oration or treatise divided into nine points. But the word beginning with ennea that takes the prize today is enneagram [of personality], which has principally developed from the teachings of Oscar Ichazo (b. 1931), and which indicate/teach about nine principal ego-archetypal forms of human personality. It is much more complex than that, but I will leave it here. So, when I heard the word enneasyllabic, I knew it means "of nine syllables," and I spelled it quickly.

Chiavetta (plural chiavette--I don't recall whether singular or plural was given) caused me more difficulty. It is defined as "a clef (as one of the C clefs) formerly used to shift temporarily the pitch range of a staff carrying a voice part and so avoid the use of ledger lines." The word is in no other dictionary that I checked. Most "google results" for a search on chiavetta talked about some restaurant someplace. Only when I did a search on "chiavetta clef" did I find a book on Venetian music in the 17th century (Venetian Instrumental Music from Gabrieli to Vivaldi by Eleanor Selfridge-Field), which, in fairly impenetrable prose, was discussing works of Legrenzi. She writes,

"Both works (Nos. 17 and 19, for viol consort) employ a chiavetta, according to which No. 17 may be played in either G Minor or E Minor and No. 18 in either E Minor or C Minor."

But even in her highly specialized work, she had to have a footnote explaining the chiavetta. She defines it as follows:

"a system of clef alterations used to facilitate transposition, usually by the interval of a third. In works for viols it could also indication transposition from one size instrument to another," p. 168, n. 12.

When I heard "clef" in the definition, I thought of the English word "key signature." I knew that the Italian word for key is chiave. Thus, I just sounded it out and got it right.

Finally, lacustrine, which means "of or pertaining to lakes. Said esp. of plants and animals inhabiting lakes..." was a word I had come into contact with several times. I knew that the Latin for lake was lacus. Lacustri is formed off of lacus on anaolgy of palustri/paluster off of palud/palus, which means "marsh." Thus we have palustrine and lacustrine. Simple as that. Lyell, in his 1830 Principles of Geology was the first to use the word in English: "The lacustrine and alluvial deposits of Italy."

Speller # 11

It turned out that I was the only one who got all my "hard" (i.e., Round 3) words correct. The next speller got philamot, panforte, mytacism. The first word is a very good one (hence it isn't in the Collegiate, the dictionary I must use for the Senior Bee, if I decide to participate this year), but is actually listed under filemot in the OED. It is a color of a dead or faded leaf. The French word feuillemorte, dead leaf, lies behind it. But the good-old Unabridged, undaunted by the usage of the OED and examples beginning with "f" going back to 1647, spells it philamot and defines it as "Feuille Morte" or "dead leaf." Isn't that precious? Most sophisticated spellers are familiar with the word feuilleton, a part of the European newspaper designed to entertain the general reader. The word feuilleton is derived from "folio" or "leaf," i.e., a sheet of paper.

Panforte is really pretty easy if you know your Italian food. It is a traditional Italian dessert containing fruits and nuts and resembling fruitcake or the German Lebkuchen. Here are some pictures and an article. The derivation means "heavy" or "solid bread." Finally, I can see how a person would be tripped up by mytacism. Derived from the Late Greek mutakismos, fondness for the letter mu" it means "a fault of speech or writing, consisting of a too frequent repetition of the sound of the letter m." Hmmmmm. I wonder what words someone can be thinking of? Unfortunately, it is listed in the OED as metacism.

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