New Free Rice Words XXIII--Tunguska Blast and Other Words

In the previous essay I laid out three of my principles about words. Before going on to the fourth, I need to take a detour. My girlfriend walked in, having returned from the gym, bearing with her some kind of supplement known as "Tunguska Blast." I never had heard of it, and I wanted to dismiss it right away as just another hyped product that consists of nothing more than colored water. I still don't know if it has any nutritional value. But it got me researching--and I didn't know that the "Tunguska Explosion" exactly 100 years ago (in June 1908), which may have been caused by a meteorite explosion about 3 miles above the earth, is believed to be the largest impact event on land in the past century. The force of the explosion was 1,000 times that of the Hiroshima bombs. The explosion is so named because it happened in the remote Tunguska River valley in Siberia.

As I say, I know nothing about the nutritional value of the product, but now am fired to learn more about this event, its causes and effects. How is it we remain so ignorant of so many things for so long?

Principle Four

I am interested in meaning, and not simply in spelling. The effect of this principle is that I go much more slowly through words than a person who simply wants to memorize a list. A few weeks ago there was a news story that said that older adults read more slowly than younger people but seem not only to absorb much more but pause and "ask questions" of the material more often than younger people. If things don't make sense, an older person will stop and says, "This doesn't make sense." It is as if a full plate of life experience has taught us "older" people (I am 56) to take it slow in our reading. We can understand anything put before us; let's just see what it is. This principle affects the way I study words. I am only secondarily interested in the spelling of the words, though I learn the spelling just as eagerly as I will learn the date of important events in history. But I am most fascinated by the journeys that words initiate. Thus, rather than learning 100 words, I may just learn three, but I will have great fun with them. For example, here are the words from freerice.com that I wanted to learn something about. I guess I knew how to spell almost all of them; if I was simply interested in "spelling right," I would never have checked them out. But they beckoned me on. Here they are:

"sippet, dingle, sofar, simous, suricate, staggard, mondaine, sooey, lory, murrey, mallemuck, adject, staddle, shoji, lory, subception, dissepiment, capelin, siphuncle.

Let's conclude this essay by going over a few of them. I then will need another essay to tell the rest of their stories...

1. Subception is a word, introduced in 1949, that we now know as a "subliminal message." Indeed, it is a shortened form of "subliminal perception." From the Journal of Personality (1949): "An experiment which confirms the notion that subjects give discriminatory galvanic skin responses to visual stimuli presented at tachistoscopic speeds too brief for correct verbal report...it is suggested that the level of perceptual activity indicated by this finding be called subception." So, it is perception "under the radar," so to speak.

2. Sofar is one of those terms arising just after WWII, when technology was steaming ahead rapidly, and acronymns and other words were developed to explain these developments. Sofar is a system in which the sound waves from an underwater explosion are detected at a number of listening stations so that its position can be fixed. From 1948 we have: "A network of four listening stations is being established in the Pacific by the Navy Department, and the name SOFAR, from the words SOund Fixing And Ranging, has been assigned to the system." I don't hear many people talking about this today, but there it is....

3. A staggard is a four year-old deer. In George Turberville's 1575 book The noble arte of venerie or hunting, we have the first (to my knowledge) application of different names to different ages of a stag. He says:

"An hart is called the firste yeare a Calfe, the seconde a Brocket, the thirde a spayde, the fourth a Staggard, the fifth a stagge."

Some sources call the "brocket" a stag in the third year, but the OED informs us (brocket s.v.) that this is incorrect. By the way, on the subject of word leading to word, I looked up brocket and saw that a male brocket is called a pricket.

I may never win a national spelling title by going slowly (even though I think I will), but I will fill in the spaces of my intellectual landscape in a very satisfying way as I make the journey. I hope this is true for you, too.

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