Portland Spelling Bee Quarterly Finals II

Here are the words from round three (one speller had been eliminated by the end of round two): lepidopterist, webelos, panickiness, umlaut, macaque, solecistic, troika, ligature, ursine, swindleable, woebegone, tachometer, Machiavellian, valetudinarian, lieutenancy, luncheonette. A few humorous remarks are appropriate, and then I will look only at a few of these words briefly.

Sometimes in a spelling bee you get words that "fit" you perfectly; other times you get words that you probably, because of your lifestyle or identity, simply haven't run across. Both were true here. My friend Gil, a law professor and driver of fancy sports cars, got tachometer. As he said to me a little sheepishly after the competition, 'You don't own a Porsche without knowing how to spell tachometer." But the word webelos worked just the opposite way against Speller # 2. As anyone knows who has been involved in cub and boy scouting, "webelos" was the intermediary rank between cub and boy scout. When I was in scouting in the 1950s/early 1960s, we had, for cub scouts, "wolf, bear and lion" years and then, before becoming a "boy scout," you were a "webelos." At least that is the way I think it worked. It was explained to me then that "webelos" is a kind of made-up word to stand for "wolf, bear, lion"--badges you had already attained. This web site tells us that currently the webelos badge is the fifth rank in cub scouting (tiger cub, bobcat, wold, and bear are the first four). It happened that speller # 2 was a lesbian (she doesn't mind me saying that, I am sure)...and probably had very little to do with boy-scouty things. So, she spelled it incorrectly. Then, Norton, the oldest speller (he probably is in his early 70s) got "luncheonette," a place that he probably frequented regularly when they flourished in the 1950s, long before almost all the other spellers had been born...

Spellers slipped up on webelos, solecistic, ursine. I only want to comment on solecistic. It really is a very difficult word, and probably shouldn't have been in the second round. The term is derived from ancient grammar (I have written on solecisms here), and originally was invented by ancient Greeks to deride the pronunciation of their language by colonists from Soloi in Asia Minor. Thus a solecism became an impropriety or irregularity in speech or diction. I don't think the word is much used today, though it is a very good one--probably for round three or four...

Round Four

The words were: yarborough, whorlywort, linsang, lycanthrope, majuscule, xenogamy, noctivagant, micrurgy, laureation, ligneous, wobbulator, neolalia, zaibatsu, obloquy, wharfinger, ordnance. We still had only one person eliminated by the beginning of this round. People missed tons of words here, however. Words misspelled were yarborough, whorlywort, linsang, majuscule, xenogamy, noctivagant, wobbulator.

Both whorlywort and wobbulator would be, in my mind, rare terms. Whorlywort only has about 1440 Google results and is absent from the OED and Collegiate. It is defined as "a tall perennial herb having spikes of small white or purple flowers; common in eastern North America." It is also known as Culver's Root (Veronicastrum virginicum). Since there are more than 150,000 Google results for Culver's Root, you kind of wonder who calls this flower a whorlywort... Ms. "Webelos" had the misfortune of getting this word, and down she went. A wobbulator is a term from electronics, and is defined as: "A signal generator in which a motor-driven variable capacitor is used to vary the output frequency periodically between two known limits, as required for displaying a frequency-response curve on the screen of a cathode-ray oscilloscope." Enough said...

One of the really difficult words from this round was majuscule. Since its definition has to do with a manuscript on which is large lettering, it is understandable that the speller began her word with "magis...." But it is derived from a 15th century French word majuscule. I first ran into this term when I was learning textual criticism of ancient manuscripts in my first term in graduate school. Thus, it is an "easy" term for text critics. Just as the spelling of "wobbulator" would be simple for a person in electronics, so a student of ancient texts finds majuscule trivially simple. Study hard, so that it all is trivially easy for you.

I could go on nearly forever, such as if I wanted to fix yarborough in your mind by saying that it is, in whist and bridge, a hand which contains no card above a nine, and was named because a certain Earl of Yarborough used to bed 1,000 to 1 against the occurrence of such a hand, but I will move on...

Round Five Words

Twelve spellers still remained going into this round, with at least four of us not having missed a word. Here are the words from this round: mnestic, morbidezza, micawberish, therblig, zapateado, nunchaku, moline, cynophilist, holophrastic, periapt, cucurbit, soubise. Several of these were spelled incorrectly: mnestic, morbidezza, micawberish, therblig, zapateado, moline, cynophilist, soubise. The goal of this round was to weed out lots of spellers, and Katherine was at her best here. Though mnestic doesn't appear in the OED, it is there in the Unabridged, and it means "of or relating to memory." Here is where a small dose of Greek mythology comes in handy. Mnemosyne was a Titan goddess, daughter of Ouranos, and she was goddess of memory and remembrance and the inventress of words and language. The Greeks also had Mneme, "memory," one of the three Muses that were in early times worshipped at Ascra in Boeotia. Thus, whenever a word has "memory" in it, thing "mn." The rest of the word should flow rapidly.

If you are familiar with the father of the Cheaper by the Dozen family, Frank Gilbreth, you have all you need to know for spelling "therblig" correctly--just reverse the letters of his name. He was one of the early efficiency experts, helping the modern capitalistic state become even more profitable by breaking down work into its most minute units so that each unit could be studied independently of others and improvements in production could be made.

I wrote on morbidezza and some of my remaining confusion about the derivation of the term here, and so I don't have to repeat myself. But Micawberish merits some mention here. It was missed because words derived from proper names are often among the most difficult to spell in English (is it macfarlane or mcfarlane, for example? The first is right). It is from Dickens' David Copperfield, and is taken from the name of Wilkins Micawber, whose "unquenchable optimism is characterized by his frequently stated belief that something will 'turn up.'" Thus, we can have a Micawberish boss or child or co-worker or friend. It is a perfectly good word, but it is only good if you know a little about Dickens...

My friend Gil slipped up on cynophilist (a dog lover). He spelled it as it sounded--sinophilist, but that might have something to do with an Asian lover. Not a bad thought in some circumstances, but for the spelling bee, it wasn't the right idea.

I need one more essay to finish the bee.

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