A Few Words from the May 11 Portland Spelling bee

For the past 18 months the Mississippi Pizza Pub in Portland has been sponsoring a weekly spelling bee. Hosted by the incomparable Katherine ("with a 'K') Woods-Eliot, the bee will be undergoing a "transformation" after June 16. If that word is used as President Bush uses the word, that means it will utterly end. But Katherine will be off to other pursuits, and the management says that it will begin a monthly bee of a different sort in the Fall. The Re-bar Bee in Seattle also went through change after about 16 months with the same hosts; I don't know if they will continue. I will miss the bees, but, in a strange sort of way, I don't think I will need them much any more since I have just about arrived at a level of basic word knowledge which shall carry me for many years to come. But the Portland Bee was instrumental in enhancing my commitment to words and achieving the level of understanding I have.

Thus, in honor of the bee on May 11, which I won and which may be my last at the Pub, I will review a few of the words used on that occasion, most of which tripped up someone.

1. My friend Gil, who almost always makes it to the final three or four spellers, missed the word tenebrosity. If you know that tenebrae is the medieval Latin word for "darkness", and if you know further, that one or more of the Worship Services during Holy Week is called the "Tenebrae Service," in which candles lighted at the beginning of the service are extinguished one by one after each psalm, in memory of the darkness at the time of the crucifixion, you will be all set. Gil is Catholic and I am Protestant, but I learned this word at a "progressive" Protestant Church in Boston in the late 1970s, where "progressive" liturgically meant "Catholic," while "progressive" theologically meant anything other than Catholic! There are so many good English words built off the Latin root for darkness: tenebrescence (from physics--to signify a bleaching process--though I think anyone should be able to use this); tenebrific (meaning to produce darkness; obscuring; Carlyle used this memorable line in 1858: "books done by pedants and tenebrific persons under the name of men..."); tenebrio (originally "one who lurks at night"); tenebrity (darkness, material or mental) and several others. The word has a certain dark and solemn timbre to it. What is striking to me from studying the OED entries is that there doesn't appear to be any useful verb beginning with "teneb" to express going into darkness or living in darkness, etc. Pity. Maybe we should invent one.

2. One of the spellers missed unguligrade, which means to "walk on toes or hoofs." The vowel in the middle of the word is difficult; I think he suggested an "a." But if you know that unguligrade goes together with its two neighbors digitigrade (walking on digits or toes) and plantigrade (walking on the whole foot), you are in good shape and won't spell it incorrectly. The Latin word planta means "the sole of the foot," and it may derive ultimately from the same Indo-European base as Greek platus, which means "broad" or "wide."

3. There is also a three-fold cord that should not quickly be broken stimulated by the word leptocercal, also misspelled by someone. This word doesn't appear in the OED, and is rare even in a Google search. The Unabridged has it as a term from vertebrate zoology: "of the tail of a fish, tapering to a long, slender point." Of course leptos means "small, fine, thin or delicate," but I had forgotten that cercal is derived from the Greek kerkos, which means "tail." I had thought that the only Greek word for tail was ouros. Since the Latin word for tail was cauda, we should only have "tail-words" that end in either "ouros" or "cauda/l." But cercal (which is pronounced like the word "circle") does in fact mean "tail." Thus, we have our definition. But there are a few words in English that end in cercal that are in the Century: anisocercal, isocercal. The former means "unequal tail" and the latter, a sort of duh! statement, "equal tail." Actually, isocercal means "having the tail part of the vertebral column straight, and not bent up." Well, I think I see essays coming on "aniso" and "lepto" in my future..

4. I got the word obreptitious, which everyone else wanted to flee from, but I had seen the word previously, and because it has a legal origin to it, I eagerly went after it. Actually, the underyling word is obreption, now a rare term, which means the action of obtaining or trying to obtain something by fraud. Therefore, something obreptitious contains a false statement made for the purpose of obtaining something. So, if obreption is trying to get something by fraudulent statement, subreption (subreptitious is also a word) is the process of suppressing the truth or concealment of facts with a view to obtaining dispensation or some benefit. There may not be much reason to continue to use these words, but if we know their long past, especially in ecclesiastical contexts, we should be encouraged to be aware of the multiple types of fraud that motivate human action.

5. Let's conclude with objicient, a word that I had a chance to spell in the last round, but decided to pick typhlology instead. Because I have written about the latter here, it was easy for me. I actually wrote on objicient, a word in the 2005 Kids Bee, here. So, I can't take it any further, other than to note that it, too, has an ecclesiastical origin. Because the Church is one of the institutions with longest history in the West, it will pick up a lot of words (or manufacture them) in its wake. You don't have to be the priest or the son of a priest to know them, but it helps if you have your "religion" antennae up when you learn words.

This concludes my experience with the Portland Bee. I can say without equivocation that it provided for me much instruction, lots of pleasure and, at times, some humiliating errors. But the errors, in fact, spurred me on to attain a greater precision in spelling and knowledge of the world. With that as its product, how can you be anything other than grateful. So, let's return to some more words from the Free Rice site. We are almost in the position of knowing all the words...

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