ubiety and ubeity and ubication and ubbe and uakari

Obviously, I am leaping ahead by more than 800 pages. I have decided for my last few days of writing before the Spellng Bee that I will focus on words that I have just studied, rather than those on earlier lists that I am reviewing. The U's begin on page 1355 and end on 1380. I wrote down about 50 words, not because I didn't know how to spell them all, but because some of them have such interesting meanings that I wanted to pause and think about them for a while. But, as might be expected, I got tangled up pretty quickly, and in the following manner.

Minding My "U's"

The first "U" word I wrote down was uakari, pronounced wa KA ree, defined by the Collegiate as a naked-faced South American monkey. I decided to try to find a picture of one of these sweet naked-faced creatures, and so I turned to the Century. That is where my problems began. It said, under uakari, "saki." So, I looked up "saki," which further directed me to Pithecia. On the next page after the entry on Pithecia is a cut of such a simian, showing him with a full face of hair. But I should have realized that I needed to look up images instead on Google or Yahoo. When I did that, lo and behold, lots of pictures of naked-faced, ruddy-cheeked, furry-covered uakaris. They kind of looked like they were a Caucasian member of the Green Bay Packers playing at Lambeau Field in -15 degree weather..all bundled up and red-faced. So, this was a distraction, though a rather pleasant one.

But then there was another distraction, caused by the Century, but of a different sort. When I saw that it defined uakari as "saki," my eye wandered down the page. I ignored the next entry, Ubbenite, a German Anabaptist sect that emerged in 1534 and named after some guy named Ubbe (though I suppose if Ubbe was my first name I would want a sect named after me, too), and went on. I ran smack into ubeity, and it stopped me cold. For those who don't get around, ubeity is "the state of being in a definite place, whereness." Wow. I had never run into the word whereness despite the fact that I have spent several years in California. So, the bumper sticker that says, "Wherever you go, there you are, " is an example of a belief in ubeity. I wonder if the Ubbenites believed in ubeity along with their other doctrines about rejecting some kind of earthly Kingdom of Christ.

Or maybe, switching gears, we could hypothesize that ubeity is some kind of disease--the illusion that you are where you are. Then, those of us who are rarely "here" could label the rest of the world abnormal for being "present," and we, the ones who are everywhere and nowhere, who live in the past and the future, who have difficulty meeting the exigencies of the moment and the realities of place, can really be the normal ones. We could write a DSM-V and label "on task" people "weird." Or, we might write something like this: "Ubeity: a morbid condition in which a person imagines that the world exists as it presents itself to him. Those suffering from ubeity imagine that to be 'on task' and 'on time' and to follow directions is really a virtue. Thus, those suffering from ubeity also suffer from self-deception." Wouldn't you buy such a DSM volume? Don't you think there is a future in it?

But I just couldn't help myself. I had to continue for moment with the Century. After all, if it gives you such a gift as ubeity, you just can't go back to the Collegiate without reading further. It would be the acme of ingratitude. Then there are the two related words uberous and uberty. Both are derived from the Latin, uber, meaning "fruitful." The former is defined as "yielding largely or copiously; fruitful; prolific," while the latter is the noun form of the word; hence, "fertility, productiveness." One might therefore have a uberous harvest. I might refer to Kansas, where I lived six years, as a uberous place and no one would know that I was saying something positive about it. My sense, however, is that these words have, like many people, seen better days, and I see no reason to learn them. Thus, unlearn this paragraph.

But then, I returned to ubeity with the next two words: ubication and ubiety. The latter is a different spelling of the concept of "whereness." You can spell lots of different words in lots of different ways and still have a productive life. But ubication, which the Century confesses is rare, means "situation; position; local relation; place of rest or lodgment" or, definition 2, "ubeity." I would love to hear one of the officers in a police cruiser on a Cable TV show that focuses on drug busts and other edifying topics say, "Roger, what is your ubication?" If overheard by a drug pusher, then, he would learn two Latinate phrases within a year: ubication and habeas corpus.

But I still am in the process of getting untracked, and I will need one more essay to get me properly to the "U's."

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