National Senior Spelling Bee II

In the previous essay I listed the 100 words in the written test at the Senior Spelling Bee on June 16. The purpose of this essay is to list some of the words we were "quizzed" on in the informal rounds on Friday evening, the day before the "real" competition, and then in the next essay, give as many of the words as I can after I was eliminated from the competition. I will also add a few words that I recall from earlier in the oral competition which stumped some spellers.

The Friday Night "Fun" Competition

Each year the Bee folk have a "practice" spelling bee the night before the real competition. I think this gives people an opportunity to "warm up," to meet each other and to start to size up the competition. David Lerner, the expert pronouncer, gave us words and then he asked us to give words to each other. Here are about 40 of those words. Which do you know?

superencipherment
wattle
tonometer
sone
rinkafadda
pottle
ozonizer
minnesinger
labrum
humic
garbology
feis [this is a difficult word, pronunced FESH] and was missed...
dysphoria
chiral
blithesome
amphoteric [this is also difficult, as people want to put an "i" in]
couching
vole
taphonomy
shimming
recitalist
phthisiology
nonet
marketfish
isomeric
elsewhither
denotatum
carstone--ferruginous rock found in the British Isles.
banquette
adobo
croquettes
vaporize
thirdborough
plutonian
orology
mensuration
journeycake
hexapod

Not all of these were from the Collegiate. After all, we were just having fun..

Then, David was finishied quizzing us and asked us to challenge each other. After the usual fifth grade words like "Supercalifrag..." and "Antidisestablishment..." and "Pneumonoultra..." we got down to business and began quizzing each other. Unfortunately, the words I chose were not in the Collegiate, but the words others chose generally were. Here is what that "round" looked like:

soigne--(pronounced swan YAH) showing sophisticated elegance; fashionable. But, guess what? It can also be spelled soignee and thus can't be used for a bee. Too bad. It sounds so cool.

schrecklich [this was a familiar word to me because I studied in Germany in 1980-81. But it was especially familiar because the wife of the professor with whom I stayed for a month wanted to help get me "set up" in my dorm room and discovered that the curtains in my room were filthy. I can still hear her piercing screams of "Schrecklich!!" throughout the dorm]

sarsaparilla
syllepsis
abseil [in the 2007 Kids Bee]
callipygous [usually we have the word callipygian, meaning "of the pretty buttocks" or something a little more crude]
gastrocnemius--which, when combined with the soleus muscle, forms the calf muscle.
uropygium [are we becoming addicted to the "pyg" root?]
otorhinolaryngology--simple if you just take your time.
Bewussteinslage--this word was the last of the 25 in the written test for the Kids Bee in 2007. Indeed, in a pre-bee interview the eventual winner, Evan O'Dorney, said that bewussteinslage was his favorite word. I have written about the word here. The person who spelled it correctly on Friday night was a native North Dakotan. They can spell any German word up there.
sheugh--Susan Hartner gave us this word, which appeared in the Collegiate and none of us knew it.
onchocerciasis
sansevieria
xysti

I had a whole list of words that I would use to challenge ourselves. But, come to think of it, none of them was from the Collegiate, so that made my words rather irrelevant. Nevertheless, for you word-lovers, here they are:

anaptyxis--another word for epenthesis.
matthiola--a flower
shawabti or ushabti. Here is an article on these Egyptian beauties.

I will close this essay with my two favorite words. The first has appeared in one kids bee, but it isn't a very common term. The second word is in the Unabridged but I haven't seen it used in any bee, nor does it appear on any list of difficult words I have seen. I am just waiting to get it on some occasion, when I will promptly hit it out of the park, to the astonished oohs and aahs of the crowd. They are:

culicidologist (the study of the gnats is culicidology; the dictionaries have problems, however, in knowing what you call an agent that puts these gnats to death. Is it a culicide or a culicicide? This matters to almost no one; but that is probably why I bring it up late on a July night).

And, my all-time favorite:

xenodocheionology--having to do with the lore of inns...

I guess I need one more essay to get to some of the words used in the oral rounds on Saturday...

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