2005 National Spelling Bee--Essay 24

The fifteen words I would like to tell you about in this essay are: rejoneador, estafette, rhagadiform, synechthran, farraginous, tristachyous, orfevrerie, schecke, etouffee, cholecyst, domra, plumassier, rupicaprine, serang and ornithorhyhchous. All these are pretty tough. You really have to love your words, or have worked very hard, to get many of these. I don't think we will get through all of these in this essay, but I will in the next.

1. I am going to start with the last word, ornithorhynchous, because it can be spelled two ways. Anurag Kashyap, who finished in the top five of the competition, spelled the word correctly. I don't see it on any of the study lists published by Scripps, and so she had to have really known her stuff. The word ornithorhynchus is attested over 2,000,000 times on Google and is the genus name for the Platypus. But ornithorhynchous means "having a beak like that of a bird," and is attested fewer than 5,000 times. It is derived from New Latin combined with the English "ous," which means "characteristic of." This was a trip-up word but Anurag got it. Congratulations to her! Now, let's go through the rest.

2. A rejoneador is the mounted man who throws a rejon into the shoulder muscles of the bull in bullfighting. I used to watch bullfighting when I was a kid. I think the shows were on Saturday night, and I had nothing else to do. I will never forget the rejones hanging from the bull to weaken it as the fighter prepared for the kill.

3. An estafette is a mounted courier. The word is French from Italian staffetta and literally means a "small stirrup." Renault has a line of vans called the Estafette which you can see online anytime you want.

4. Something rhagadiform is having or characterized by cracks or fissures. A rhagades, from the Greek of the same spelling, is a chink or crack, especially a crack in the skin. I really don't need to show you pictures of cracked skin--for you to know what it is. There is a product advertised online--Allpresan 3 Extra Dry Foam--for "Rhagades and Fissures." Unfortunately, the more things you have wrong with you, the better speller you may be. Just think, the more you have suffered from diseases, the more diseases you will know how to spell. Maybe that is why Plato said, in the Republic that he would only allow sickly people to become doctors. Actually, now that I think of it, Plato made this suggestion for another reason--if doctors were sickly people, they would be sympathetic to humans who came to them. Hm... Not a bad idea for today...

5. I love pronouncing synechthran. Take your time saying it. It isn't a word that rolls off your tongue, like efflorescence for example, but it activates the throat muscles. As I practice its pronunciation I see that I can either pronunce the word or choke up some saliva. I choose the former. It is attested in the OED as synechthry (the noun), and was seemingly first used in English in 1899. If you take the word apart you have "with" (syn) and "enemy" (echthros). Coined in French in 1896 by M.E. Wasmann, the term means the hostile relation between ants and certain insects which maintain themselves in ant-colonies as unwelcome guests. Thus, in two words, it is "hostile commensalism." Its opposite is "symphilism." I think we can probably talk about synecthran relationships in families these days, don't you? Why limit it to ants? Aren't words about the most wonderful things in the world (or, come to think of it, maybe the second most wonderful thing)?

6. We move on to farraginous, which is intimately related to a word many know, farrago. A farrago, derived from the Latin farrago and meaning a "mixed fodder for cattle," was originally a confused group; a medley, mixture or hotchpotch. Oops, I see a slight digression coming on. Did you know that the word hotchpotch, which was quickly shortened to hotchpot, and which means "a dish containing a mixture of many ingredients; spec. a mutton broth thickened with young vegetables of all sorts stewed together," has a significance in law? I learned from my ace Trusts & Estates Professor and then colleague Valerie Vollmar, that when you "bring things in hotchpot" in law you are gathering together properties for the purpose of securing an equal division of an estate. This is especially the case when you have an intestate parent. So, from a legal textbook from 1848 you have: "Bring the amount of their advancement into hotchpot." Well, back to farraginous.
It is the adjectival form of farrago, and it means something "miscellaneous, indiscriminate." From 1843: "The Laureate has somewhere in his farraginous notes..a story of certain Polish physicians..." Thus we can have a farraginous concatenation of circumstances, or materials, or people. It really is a wonderful and useful word.

7. Upon arriving at tristachyous, I concluded (wrongly, it turned out), that we had another neologism here, such as athyreosis in the previous essay. But I was mistaken. The OED cites the 1891 edition of the Century for this word, and the Century has "In botany, three-spiked; having three spikes." It is derived from the Greek "tri" (three) and "stachys." But I have to confess the great fun I had poring over some of the other "Tri" words in the Century. For example, some near neighbors to tristachyous are trisplanchnic, where the splanchna are the "viscera." I argued in an essay long ago that if you have a visceral reaction to something you really have a splanchnic reaction to it. Something trisplanchnic then refers to the viscera of one of the three great body cavities: the cranial, thoracic and abdominal. Well, we also have trisporic (having three spores); tristylous (having three styles--a style was originally a pointed end of metal or a bone, used for writing--hence the stylus--and so something that has three "styles" has three "points"); trisula (having three heads or spear-heads...the "sula" word is from Hindi); trisulcate (having three furrows); tritagonist (the third actor, where "agonist" is one who strives or "acts" in a play). Then, there are also tons of words surrounding tristachyous which have to do with sadness (tristfully, tristesse, etc. I love the verb tristitiate--meaning "to make sad or sadden").

I am afraid, for about the millionth time, that I have gotten carried away and will have to do another essay on the remaining words; I promise only one more after that to "finish" the 2005 Bee.

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