Portland Spelling Bee Quarterly Finals, Essay One

Last evening a group of 17 intrepid spellers competed for the $100 cash prize at the quarterly finals of the Portland Spelling Bee. This double elimination tournament, run masterfully (as usual) by Katherine, began with a round of monosyllabic words, which often can be pretty tough, continued with a relatively easy round and then, beginning with round 3, turned to difficult words. By the time we got to Round 6 only seven spellers remained. But five fell in that round, leaving Amanda and me as the finalists in Round 7. Neither of us had missed a word. In that round she slipped on crotalid and I, fortunately, got the relatively easy word hawser. It was not until Round 11 that she missed her second word (see below) and I spelled mine correctly. She is a very fine speller, having won several of the weekly bees in the first quarter of 2008.

Words open worlds, and my fondest wish is that spellers or word-lovers will look at these words as jewels strewn in our path which ought to be examined with care and incorporated into our lives along with our other most precious possessions. These three essays reviews the words from last night's bee.

Round One Words

Katherine started us off with monosyllabics. In order they were: whist, snood, taupe, mien, lieu, lathe, niche, myrrh, mousse, steppe, oeuvre, liege, ohm, mosque, laud, sluice, loupe. This was a much better collection of monosyllabics than used at the National Senior bee last June in Cheyenne, which had, principally because of the poverty of the dictionary we use, such obscure words as wynd, yean, urd, yeuk, and yogh. At least Katherine's list had useful words in it. Spellers missed myrrh (obviously the secular culture of Portland contributed to that!--people often fall on rather simple theological terms), oeuvre and sluice. As I was memorizing Paradise Lost, Book I, I came across "sluic'd from the lake" (I.702). Though sluice is used as a verb in Milton, its noun usage is the original one: "A structure of wood or masonry, a dam or embankment, for impounding the water of river, canal, etc...." That was the word used in the Bee. To know oeuvre you either have to know a little French or to have done a lot of reading.

I like the word snood, which I had heard previously, but I didn't know it was a sort of hairnet. Here is a picture. The appearance of "snood" in these pictures of lined head coverings made me think again that every word, no matter how seemingly obscure or difficult to spell, is trivially easy for many people--who deal with the word, commodity or idea all the time. And, if you a little more carefully at the linked page, you see that it is a web site of snoods for Orthodox Jewish womn--so that the women can practice the virtue of tzniut or modesty. I am sure that tzniut enters is in no printed English dictionary, but it will so appear sooner or later. By learning it now you have committed a pre-emptive strike against knowledge or, better said, for knowledge.

One other interesting word was loupe, which is a jeweler's small magnifying glass. Here is a picture of a loupe spectacle mount. Other pictures are easily accessible online.

The goal of understanding, first of words but then of people and ideas in general, is to possess that level of understanding so that we can consider easy any word that someone else can consider easy. That is, we have to know them all... It is a tall task, admittedly, but if people are running around telling other people to aim for the stars and getting paid thousands to utter that phrase, then it isn't at all unrealistic or unhelpful for me to urge you to know all the words--since I am not even charging you pennies for this salutary advice!

Second Round Words

The seventeen second-round words were: minimization, tapir, nemesis, wasabi, maestro, nihilism, mayonnaise, wallaby, misshapen, thesaurus, mosaicist, palooka, weevil, Naderism, exculpate, portico, crocodilian. These words are a little harder, and spellers fell on mayonnaise, wallaby, misshapen, palooka. The only word I would like to comment on here is palooka, because it illustrates my point about how words are always simple to someone. A palooka is, in boxing, an inferior or mediocre prizefighter. As the OED tells us, the word was popularized by comic-strip character Joe Palooka, a well-meaning but clumsy prizefighter first drawn by Ham Fisher in 1920, but not regularly published by newspapers until the late 1920s.

I ran across this word also in the last week, from watching the 1954 Award-winning film On the Waterfront. The hero of the story, Terry Malloy (played by Marlon Brando) is a dockworker in his late 20s who formerly had a promising career as a fighter. But he was told to "take a dive" in a fight and was subsequently never able to recover from that loss. Though he is very slow mentally, he says this to his brother Charley, the one who ordered him to throw the fight:

"What do I get? I one-way ticket to Palookaville..."

Wow! That illustrates my point above--that all words are easy to someone, as long as you know the field in which they are used. Terry, though slow, knows more than many of us in our sophisticated day, because he was a boxer and knew that a washed up fighter was a "palooka," and if your career went down the drain you get a "ticket to Palookaville."

If the speller who missed this word is a real learner, and I hope she is, she should take information like this, caress it, and never forget it as long as she lives. Not only will she have learned a new word, but she will perhaps let herself be brought into one of the classic films in American history. And, once you allow yourself to become entranced by the places and ideas where words lead you, you may never return to your/our humdrum existence. So powerful can a word be..

I really am not making much progress here, so let's move more quickly in the next essay.

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