1997 Kids Bee Final Words V

Now that we have said enough about the French words in the competition, I will conculde with examples of usages of many of the remaining words. Let's begin with a few I really like, and then move to more obscure ones. Recall that I had a complaint against this Bee because the easier words were at the end of the composition. The last four words, for example, were anglophilia, cortile, coterie and euonym, only one of which could possibly have given difficulty (cortile--which actually knocked Prem Murthy Trivedi out of the competition).

My Favorites

Let's begin with some of the words I actually love from the competition. Pride of place goes to demiurge, a term from Platonic and Gnostic philosophy describing the creator of the world. In Gnostic philosophy the demiurge is a lower order of divinity (a sort of half-wit god) than the One. The reason I like this term so much is that I cut my academic teeth on the study of early Christianity in its historical and philosophical context. I ran into demiurges as often as I encountered miracle workers. They all were in the who's who gallery of stars and rogues from the Hellenistic era.

I also like deliquesce and desquamate but for completely different reasons. The sound of the first is one that just rolls off the tongue or, alternatively, is one you can swirl around in your mouth before hissing it gently out on all who hear you. It means, simply, to melt. OW Holmes (Sr) could say: "I have known several very genteel idiots whose whole vocabulary has deliquesced into some half dozen expressions." I think that the Wicked Witch of the West's melting scene, "Oh, I'm melting, melting!" would probably not have benefitted if she said, "Oh God, I Deliquesce," but I think an R-rated version of the Wizard of Oz would be all the more memorable if the "Dorothy-figure," just after throwing the water on the Wicked Witch would say something like, "Deliquesce, bitch!" I think that would be one of the 100 most popular movie lines of the 21st century if only someone would pick up on it. If you know that the Latin word for skin or scale (of fish) is "squama," then desquamate falls easily into place. It means to "scale off," to "peel" or to "exfoliate." Indeed, maybe Dorothy's line to the Wicked Witch should have been, "Ok, bitch, deliquescence or desquamation? Right away. No delay! What do you think this is, a beauty salon?"

Ok, now that you are rolling on the floor in laughter, I will continue with internecine. It really is a very popular word today, especially when newscasters describe civil wars of all sorts around the world. Samuel Johnson, in his brilliant but idiosyncratic dictionary of 1755, defined Internecine as "endeavouring mutual destruction," and we haven't improved on the definition or gotten rid of the concept since then. Just when humanity begins to congratulate itself that it is taking steps toward lasting peace, another debilitating war breaks out. I am afraid that internecine, like the poor, will always be with us.

Oculogyric

The word oculogyric is seemingly owned almost completely by the scientists today, but I propose right here, with you as witness, to take it back from them. It means "relating to the movement of the eyes," and its first attestation was in 1922: "Oculogyric, opthalmogyric, oculomotor." Ok, it has to do with eyes spinning. By 1979 we are slogging deeply in medical journals: "The visual afferent pathways affect the oculogyric centres in two ways.." The French devloped the phrase "crise oculogyre" (oculogyric crisis) in 1926 to describe the involuntary contraction of the ocular muscules resulting in the fixation of the eyes in an extreme position (typically upward-looking). As recently as 2002 we have this attestation: "A 46 year-old woman with a triplet pregnancy developed seizures, an oculogyric crisis and a homonymous hemianopia post-natally." I bet you are glad you aren't that woman! By the way, hemianopia (also written hemianopsia) literally means "no vision in one-half" (of one's field of vision). I suppose that if you had both hemianopsia and an oculogyric crisis you would be having a particularly bad day.

But here is how I hope to redeem the word oculogyric, just as the Scriptures tell us to redeem the time. I want to develop it on the model of another double Greek word: omphaloskepsis. We know that omphaloskepsis means "gazing at the navel," and so why wouldn't oculogyric mean "rolling the eyes"? Since many people spend most of their time rolling their eyes at the behavior of others, I think we have a very popular and important means of describing millions and millions of (usually) young people. Just as we might say that a narcissistic person is omphaloskeptic, I think we might say something like: "After being told for the fourth time to take out the garbage, he reluctantly complied--but not without a sigh, a muttered imprecation and predictable oculogyric movements." Or, we could say that a teacher's mode of operation evoked groans and oculogyric tremors from the students.

Finishing

We can't really give equal time to all the deserving words on the list. I feel like the author of Hebrews 11 in narrating the stories of the heroes of faith. He spent tons of verses on Abraham and Moses, but then realized that he was running out of time and told us that time would fail him to tell of the deeds of the other Biblical heroes. So, I have Scriptural authority to skip quickly over the remaining words. Let's close with holophytic, sufflaminate and filiciform. The OED has nearly 100 words beginnig with "holo" (whole), and it almost is too much to bear not to run right through them. But we must move on. Holophytic is "of, pertaining to, or designating a plant that is able to transform inorganic substances into food by photosynthesis, and so is neither parasitic nor saprophytic" (A "saprophyte" lives on decaying organic matter. My, I think an insult was just born). I am sure that a trip down "holo" lane would be wonderfully revealing, only not today. Sufflaminate is a verb meaning "to put an obstacle in the way of, obstruct, retard the motion of." I confess I hadn't heard the word before the Bee, though I knew how to spell it. Then, there is filiciform, which I, like the poor child, got wrong. I guess I didn't know my Latin thoroughly enough, because the root "filix" means "fern," and something that is filiciform is "fern-shaped." For the life of me, I can't find another word that it is paired with. Google searches for "filiciform leaves" or "bouquets" or "plants" or many other things came up empty. I think it is a term that really isn't used at all anymore, if it was ever used. Thus, the good committee that develops words should be spanked with a handful of ferns.

Conclusion

If time permitted, I would certainly look at vitrescible, gramineous, apsidal, discalced, pignorate, solenoid and palynological. It would be fun, I assure you. But now I think I will stop here and return to my 2007 words as I continue to make lists of useful words to know.

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