Words Beginning with T from Around the World

On Sunday, June 10 my pastor at St. Francis of Assisi Episcopal Church (Wilsonville, OR) allowed me to have the adult education hour to discuss my participation in the 2007 Senior Spelling Bee and my interest in words/spelling to anyone who wanted to come. About a dozen of us met, and many of them brought me some words to stump me. They brought scordatura (got that right) and matthiola (not in the Collegiate--got wrong) and shawabti (more popularly known as usabti) and pozzolana. The last is in the Collegiate and I got it wrong, so I knew something had gone amiss. I checked the word later, and discovered it could be spelled either as pozzolana or pozzolan. Hence they can't use it in the Bee. The OED only has it as pozzolana, a volcanic ash found near Pozzuoli (aha!) in Italy and used in the preparation of hydraulic cement, while the Unabridged has it five, that is right five different ways. You wish that dictionary-makers would just quit puttzing or pozzing around and pick one, don't you?

One of the people in class, Christopher, who is a pharmaceutical rep., brought me a list of about 75 drug terms. I truly appreciate that list, and I am working through them as I have time. Many of them are in the Collegiate, such as ciprofloxacin, amoxicillin, alprazolam, and doxycycline. I can see a future in drug terms for me...

Some Ts through Zs

That class inspired me to return to the dictionary and pick a segment of it that I hadn't recently studied. When I began to leaf through the t's, I knew I had my work cut out for me. The following 45 or so words caught my attention. I will list them here and then comment on a few.

tabun
takahe
tampion
teasel
teliospore
temazepam
terai
theremin
thysanura
trevally
tristearin
vancomycin
veratrine
verapamil
zein
ziram

taffeta
takin
tarn
teff
teiid
terbutaline
tetrapyrrole
thioridazine
thurl
triamcinolone
triticale
valpolicella
veratridine
vasopressin
zineb
zouk

tael
tamari
tarantism
telium
terazosin
teppanyaki
tetrahymena
tetramerous
tetramethyllead
trimethoprim
valine
veratrum
verdin
zamia
zidovudine
pravastatin

Describing a Few Words

I think I have said what now has become "Long's Rule # 1" in spelling. Every word is easy to spell--you just have to talk to the people who deal in it all the time. For example, the word triticale (four syllables) appeared in the Kids 2007 Spelling Bee and therefore is a hard word. But then, when I saw that the definition was "a hybrid cereal grass produced by crossing various species or varieties of wheat and rye," I thought to myself..hm..KANSAS! My home for six years. And I decided to do an internet search using "Kansas" and "triticale" in the same sentence. Well, one of the first results was a publication put out by the K-State extension office entitled "Triticale in Kansas." How about that!? Did you know that triticale generally has higher forage yields but lower quality than wheat, especially when harvested as hay or silage? Well, you can read all about it, I am sure. But as you read it, so will many farmers in Western Kansas. Thus, the next time I go to Garden City to do some consulting, I am just going to go into a local cafe, sit down with some guys in bib overalls, and say, "Friends, do any of you know how to spell 'triticale.'" I bet they will spell it with the confidence of an Indian-American Bee finalist spelling "Darjeeling."

Tabun is almost a taboo word, because it refers to the name of an "organophosphorus nerve gas." First coined in 1951, the term was used to describe a German nerve gas from WWII. "The nerve gas Sarin, known as GB, is said to be four times as toxic as the German Tabun of World War II." The word is not capitalized in the Collegiate, and hence is fair game. Taffeta is also spelled taffety in the OED, but it only has the former spelling in the Collegiate. It is a name applied "at different times to different fabrics." I suppose that doesn't help too much, but it generally relates to a glossy silk of any color or a light thin silk of some luster. There are tons of pictures online. I suggest you go to a fabric dealer and mention the word taffeta to him/her and ask for its spelling. You will, no doubt, not be disappointed.

If, however, you were to go to someone for whom teiid falls off his lips like nursery rhymes from the lips of preschool teachers you would go to a herpetologist. Such a person studies lizards and snakes, and teiid is "any of a family of mostly tropical America lizards (as the race runner) with an elongate forked tongue (family Teiidae, of course). It isn't hard to find a biologist or even a biology graduate student if you are wandering around the campus of a major university. S/he would easily set you straight on your spelling of teiid.

Dead men may tell no tales, but live men are certainly interested in tael, the name used in English to refer to various weight measures of East Asia. Most commonly it refers to a part of the Chinese system of weights and measures. Silver currency as ingots were called sycee (SIGH see). Thus, we have learned two new words, but if you were in the business of trade with East Asia, the words would be as simple to spell as to read the story of Ping, which I grew up on.

A few nights ago I was over at my friend Gil's home, and he regaled me and another friend with stories of his New Zealand trip in 2006. He stayed there a few months while on sabbatical. Well, any New Zealander would know that a takahe (ta KAH hay) is a flightless bird native to NZ. The word is Maori, but there is a growing and deep appreciation of that culture in the mainstream NZ population, and the word, and the bird, would be quite familiar. I bet a 3rd grader in NZ could spell it properly.

Then, let's finish with takin and tamari. Well, if the New Zealanders would have spelled takahe as quickly as a Buddhist would spell koan, then a Tibetan would spell takin as quickly as Edmund Hillary would spell Everest. A takin (TAH keen) is a bovid ruminant of Tibet and adjacent areas of Asia related both to the goat and the musk ox. Then, go to Japan and ask someone there, who knows English (!) how to spell tamari. A Japanese person would most likely spell it correctly because it is an aged soy sauce prepared with little or no added wheat. I wonder if they ever add triticale to it?

So far my thesis "holds." These words are trivially easy for millions of people in the world; only each word is easy for different groups. The goal of being a wordsmith/speller is to have each nation's and group's experience of living be so accessible and known to you that their words are as familiar to you as they are to them. That, indeed, is a tall order.

Let's continue describing this list.

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