2005 Scripps Howard Bee Words and Explanations

This essay investigates several words from the first round of the 2005 Bee. I will begin with the scientific terms (4) and conclude with words on which I want to make additional comments. Let's begin, however, with a word I left out from the preceding list: sevillana. We can see in it something from "Seville," and indeed that is its origin. It is defied as "Seguidilla (further defined s.v. as a Spanish dance with many regional variations--thanks) esp. the sequidilla as danced in Seville." Well, as you can see, we are not helped much by the definition, though if I am ever in Seville, I think I will check it out.

Scientific Terms

Four of these appeared: synoecious, peripneustic, phenylalanine, monoxenous. Derived from words meaning "living together in the same house," synoecious is a botanical term referring to having male and female flowers in one head or having male and female organs in the same receptacle, as many mosses. I am above my head in describing phenylalanine, but suffice it to say that it is an essential alpha amino acid, existing in two forms (D and L). The word monoxenous (Greek for "one stranger or guest") was coined in 1940 in the following sentence: "Parasites of animals may also be classified according to the number of hosts necessary for completion of the life cycle. Species in which there is a single host are termed monoxenous." Ten thousand Google "hits" for the word make it one of moderate familiarity. I put off peripneustic until the end because it shows how easily scientific terminology can be multiplied. The scientific Latin of the word (peripneusticus) first appeared in 1862, followed by the German peripneustisch in 1869 and the English peripneustic in 1891. It has to do with a respiratory system in insects in which there is a row of spiracles along each side of the body. Well, it wasn't enough for one to have one "breathing" word (pneuma is the Greek word for "spirit" or "breath"); others had to be formed, too. We then had metapneustic--referring to some abdominal spiracles on both sides of the body, and apneustic (not in the OED), meaning that there were no spiracles, or amphipneustic, where thoracic and abdominal spiracles were on each side of the body, and polypneustic, where there just are a bunch of spiracles. I wish there were some pictures of all these things, but I suppose the words are necessary to attain some precision.

Back to Some Interesting Words

Of the 10 or so words to go, let's begin with one which sounds particularly cool: bosselated. The meaning of this adjective is quite simple if you know that it is the first, rather than the eighth or ninth meaning of boss which is indicated. A boss is "a protuberance or swelling on the body of an animal or plant." It can be a knob in wood at the intersection of ribs or beams in a vault or ceiling. Thus, a boss is something of irregular shape that breaks up the consistency of a surface. Something bosselated, therefore is something "covered with inequlaities or protuberances." Though mostly attested in medical dictionaries, we can show our creativity by retrieving it from there and using it for intelligent descriptive discourse.

Schalstein, a slaty or shaly variety of tufaceous (volcanic) rock, calls for comment not so much because of schalstein (which actually means shell stone), but because of that interesting word tufaceous. Tufaceous, appropriately enough, means made up of "tufa," and "tufa," for you word enthusiasts, is a rough rock either from fragmentary volcanic material or a calcarous deposit from springs. Usually used in the phrase calcarous tufa, the word tufa is rare in English. Now the OED defines schalstein as "calcarous tuffaceous rocks" (two "f's"). Is there a difference between the two? Well, the OED suggests there is a very slight difference, but I can't see it. If you want more information here, that's just tuff, or tuf.

Dactyloscopy and several related words, the most familiar of which may be dactylology, begin with "finger" and end with what you do with the finger, so to speak. Well, let's march through a few of these "finger" terms. Dactylography is the same thing as dactylology. Dactylology goes all the way back to 1656 where it is defined as "speech made with fingers." George Dalgarno wrote the first book on the subject in 1680 called Didascalocophus, or the deaf and dumb man's tutor. In it he had the following: Cheirology, or dactylology..is interpretation by the transient motions of the fingers" [Cheir is the Greek word for "hand"]. Dactyloscopy to mean "the examination of finger prints" was first attested in the early 20th century. A fingerprint was first known as a dactylogram, but still by the early 1920s, the method of dactyloscopy was not well respected. From 1921: "Poroscopy is infinitely more fruitful in results than the one known by the name of dactyloscopy." Poroscopy, invented in France in the early 20th century, was a method of identifying a person from a fingerprint by matching the characteristic pattern of pores on the finger to the marks on a print, rather than the ridges examined by dactylologists. Now, of course, poroscopy is only of historical interest. I even found a quotation from 1986 introducing us to another "scopy." "Sjoquist..applies the principles of dactyloscopy, poroscopy and edgescopy to the palm-prints preserved on the Linear B tablets." There are no helpful reference to edgescopy on the Net. I did find that edgescopy is covered in less than a page in R.A.Gregory's Identification of Disputed Documents, Fingerprints and Ballistics (4th ed. 1990), but don't know anything about it.

So many interesting wanderings, don't you think, and we still have about five words to go, as well as some others I have swept up along the way. There is always tomorrow to understand them...

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