Portland Spelling Bee and Larythmics

Last night I decided to venture up to Portland to take part in the weekly spelling bee at the Mississippi Ave. Pizza Pub in North Portland. I ended up getting 2nd, losing to Linda Goertz, whom I like a lot and whom I met last year at the Oregon Senior Spelling Bee. She has already blogged her victory; I congratulate her on it. However, the purpose of this essay is to introduce some of the words that were either given last night in the Bee or which Linda, Julie Golden (an excellent speller who arrived with Linda) and I were discussing before the bee or which I wanted to note on this page. I will just list nine words and only have time to write about one, I fear. Here is the list: faja (the winning word, some kind of sash), helobious (from the kids' 2006 bee; for some reason it is on my mind--having to do with living in marshes or swamps); hematopoiesis/hematopoietics (one of Linda's favorite terms--having to do with formation of blood cells in a living body); pashm (the soft underfur of Tibetan goats--I actually found this word on the way to trying to find Julie's word that she missed--I still haven't found it, but I settled for pashm), larithmics (see below); fermiere (food prepared in plain country style; lit. "after the farmer's wife"..I wonder if she cut off their tail with the carving knife...); ranine (of or relating to frogs; whoops, a friend of mine has a daughter named Rana--I wonder if she knows..); mussitation (either movement of the lips without sound or a murmuring); incurvariid (another one of Linda's words--meaning something to do with a moth). As I tend to do, I run home and do full word searches on as many words as I can, not only to learn to spell or define the word but also, wherever possible, to create and understand the human context which produced the word. Here is my effort on larithmics, which was actually spelled correctly by one of the contestants last night.

Larithmics

Larithmics doesn't even appear in the OED, much less the Merriam-Webster Collegiate (11th Ed.) or the Century. It is in Webster's 3rd New International, and is defined as follows: "the scientific study of the quantitative aspects of population." Yep, that is it. No year of first introduction; no attribution to anyone. It appears to be like the Biblical Melchizedek, without father or mother but continuing a priest forever. There are about 5,000 results in a Google search, but most of them are trash. Well, I decided to do some work on it and bingo!, I found a 1930 article by New York University sociologist Henry Pratt Fairchild entitled: "Larithmics: An Addition to Sociological Terminology" (appearing in the American Journal of Sociology for that year, pp. 278-81). All of a sudden, I was dropped into the social context which produced this word. Let me fill you in.

Pratt confronted a problem facing sociologists in the interwar period--developing a terminology for a developing discipline. He had words at hand from general English usage, but sometimes they carried such baggage or limitation with them that he wanted to branch off in other directions and coin a term. The problem that sociologists study is, primarily, society or aggregations of people. They want to know how groups behave; that is why they developed the survey, perhaps the most signal contribution of sociology to our modern world.

Well, the problem confronting Fairchild was that he wanted to study large population groups. Sociology already had two terms to describe what you might call the "qualitative" features of large groups. One of them, which had a checkered and controversial history, was eugenic, coined by Francis Galton in 1883. The "science" of "eugenics" aimed at making "better" people; hence, the reference to quality. Then, in 1905, Mrs. E. H. Richards, in the Cost of Shelter, introduced the word euthenics in the following sentence: "The student of social ethics...Euthenics, or the science of better living--may well ask..Are the people growing more healthy..stronger, happier?" Thus, euthenics is the science or art (the OED hedged its bets in the definition) of improving human well-being by bettering the conditions of life. So, we have these qualitative terms, but Fairchild just wanted to study masses of people quantitatively. He wanted to learn how groups of people reacted to certain phenomena, without concern for whether he could improve their condition or not.

What to Do?

So, he mulled his situation. He could use a term ready at hand to describe masses of people--the term "population"--but he said that use of this term wasn't satisfying to him because it was too general to be helpful. He needed something more precise. So, he invented a word to describe groups of people in their quantitative aspects. But, pray tell, when you invent a term, how do you do it? Where do you go for inspiration, so to speak? It was 1930, and that means you go to Greek. We have, in general, lost the sense of classical languages in our culture today, despite some efforts of modern teachers to bring it back, but Greek was not Greek to the people of the early 20th century. Then Fairchild made another interesting move. He knew that the Bible was also written in Greek (at least the NT originally; the Greek OT was called the Septuagint, though, as you know, the OT was originally written in Hebrew), and he, being an educated man of that day, knew his Bible. So, he says colorfully, the following words:

"In this emergency (i.e., needing to invent a word), the writer has been casting about for the right word to fill the gap. For obvious reasons it has seemed desirable that it should be built up from Greek roots. When the passage in the Old Testament where David 'numbered the people' was recalled, it appeared that here should be found the precise roots sought for. Reference to the Greek version of this document, the Septuagint, revealed that the two words in question were laos, people, and arithmos, number (cf. II Samuel. 24: 2 and I Chronicles 21:5). Further consideration confirmed the appropriateness of these roots. The next step was to combine them in condensed form, which done, there emerged the word, 'larithmics,'" (p. 284).

Conclusion

Isn't that a wonderful little story? So, by looking deeply into the history of words, we not only learn to spell a word, which is the first step in understanding human life, but we are taken into a different culture and set of assumptions, and we learn precisely why a word was invented. But, unfortunately for Fairchild, larithmics doesn't see to have caught on. Euthemics has far more appearances on Google searches and, of course, eugenics has been all over our world in the last century. But, fear not. Maybe spelling bees will resurrect, if not Henry Pratt Fairchild, then at least his word larithmics. We had a first try at it last night.

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