Oregon Senior Spelling Bee III
Bill Long 4/12/08
The Oral Rounds
Nine of us participated in the oral rounds. It took nearly 80 words to whittle us down. At the end, the competition was stopped when I had a one-word lead over Linda Goertz. She missed one word in the orals (gambusia), whereas I spelled mine correctly. Let's go by blocks of 35 or so words.
curmudgeon
neuralgia
yuan
osteoporosis
ischemia
flavonoid
oscine
gambusia
pistil
apotropaic
debauchery
colander
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brouhaha
jicama
gnathic
balalaika
sukkah
mellifluous
fuscous
cotoneaster
geoduck
forb
muntin
phlox
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caterwauling
sleazy
homocysteine
paraphernalia
metonymy
synergy
baccarat
abattoir
charcuterie
cognoscente
conundrum
orgeat
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Well, what can we say about these 36 words? Most are not too difficult, but several have "curve ball" elements to them which can easily trip up even an experienced speller. The first mistake was on homocysteine. I don't even want to start to try to explain it, since this would take us into basic and advanced chemistry. I will have to brush up on chemical terms, however, if I want to do well in Cheyenne. The next word missed was sukkah, which the (very good) speller just before me spelled as sukka. There really is no good reason why the word couldn't be so spelled, but when a Hebrew noun ending in "hay" is brought into English, an "ah" ending is normal. It is a tabernacle or tent in which Israelites are supposed to live during the feast of Tabernacles. Since I was just about to write on metonymy (though I may not actually get to it) from the ancient grammarians, Donatus and Isidore, I had little difficulty with that word.
The third round of the orals began with oscine, "of or relating to the suborder Oscines of songbirds, distinguished by having the muscles of the syrinx attached to the bronchial sub-rings." The OED also attests oscinine, which means the same thing, but I think oscinine is the way a Bostonian may pronounce asinine. "That is such an ah-sinine comment, Governor.."
The basic problem with the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) is that it has relatively few verbs and complex adjectives, often leaving spelling bee organizers few choices for difficult words other than strange birds, flowers or exotic foods or names of coins. Linda missed her only word in the oral round in gambusia, a word even absent from the OED. It refers to a genus of freshwater fish in family Poeciliidae. Tons of pictures are online. I even found this article on "gambusia control," which argues that this little fish is a major pest and ought to be re-named damnbusia, because it causes so many problems. I have to remain mum on that subject for now...
Spellers then fell on cotoneaster (obviously the guy wasn't a gardener), pistil (neither was she) and geoduck, but the rest of the words in that round were spelled correctly. I have already humorously defined geoduck in my Billphorisms page as a well-grounded University of Oregon student... A little humor sometimes can be helpful in life. Well, we continued on flowers, or shrubs, with forb, but spellers slipped up on cognoscente and muntin. The former mistake was understandable, but I thought that Joseph, who asked whether the word was a singular or plural (singular) would have thereby gotten it. The Italian singular ends in "e," while the plural ends in "i." He spelled it with an "i." A muntin, which can be misspelled so many ways, is a certral vertical piece between two panes of glass or two panels of a door.
My first rule of spelling (to encourage me and others to excel) is that almost every word in English is trivially simple to the people "in the field" which the word suggests. Here, for example, is a website depicting the "internal muntin collection." If you work in windows, muntin is easy. Thus, if we just commite ourselves to trying to know every field, spelling will be an amazingly simple exercise for us...
The Rest of the Words
orthoepy
syllogism
philoprogenitive
limn
invigilatory
capsaicin
bromeliad
lixiviate
crepuscular
istle
corporeal
polyonymous
aposiopesis
couloir |
amanuensis
pharaoh
eclogue
halide
tocsin
budgerigar
ikebana
loess
surrogacy
triglyceride
veridical
quiddity
croquignole
presbyopia |
blitzkrieg
polyptych
nous
candela
imprimatur
piscatorial
drupelet
pettifogger
pinniped
pasqueflower
revelatory
lycanthropy
cachinnation
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As you see, these last rounds of the bee had lots of flowers or plants, with the difficult chemical term capsaicin thrown in. My words were polyptych, tocsin, ikebana, pinniped, aposiopesis, revelatory, presbyopia. As a Presbyterian minister who also is near-sighted, I was delighted that the last word of the entire bee was presbyopia... It wasn't until the ninth word on this list, nous, that a mistake was made. The word is trivially simple (as are all words, depending on the context) to those who have studied Greek philosophy--it suggests "mind" or "reason." Then, after the first spellers knocked difficult words out of the park (orthoepy; amanuensis), they stumbled on the next two: limn and halide. I love the word limn, and if you do a search for the word on my site alone, you will find me having used the word about 50 times--twice as many times as the word "limb," which is how our speller rendered it. A speller slipped up on imprimatur by adding an extra "e" after the "t." He made the Latin into French...
Most of us were scratching our heads at istle (IS tl), an exceedingly valuable fiber produced principally by the Bromelia sylvestris, a kind of wild pineapple. I suppose the person who got istle to spell would have preferred bromeliad, which Linda hit out of the park with little difficulty. Termis like lixiviate and lycanthropy also tripped up spellers, while all the terms relating to law (subpoena, pettifogger) were spelled correctly. One of my favorite of all of these words is polyonymous--of many names. The OED has this quotation from 1843: "The polyonomous (sic!) Arabian philosopher Zecharian Ben Mohammad Ben Mahmud Al Camuni Al Cazvini." I wonder if they called him "Al" for short..
Conclusion
So, I finally won, on my fifth try, the Oregon senior spelling bee. I think two things are responsible for this. First, I waited until many of the really good spellers had won (and they couldn't compete again), and I have now been to so many spelling bees that they have almost quizzed me on the entire dictionary. That should set me in good stead for Cheyenne, if I go there to try to win it all in June...
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