At the Rebar Bee--March 3, 2008; Fourth Essay on Words

Speller # 3's other words, which were also missed, were very difficult: alesan and achkan. The former is a shade of brown, which the Unabridged goes describes in some detail, though the word is absent from the OED. But this quotation, which quotes a work from 1925, may give a clue to the origin of the term in English. Chapter 5 of The Grizzly in the Southwest is entitled "Pelage and Measurements." The author tells us that an excellent description of the pelage of grizzlies in Chihuahua is provided by naturalist Charles Sheldon (no relation to the Charles Sheldon, pastor in Topeka, who wrote the enormously influential and successful In His Steps late in the 19th century) in 1925:

"Observed from a distance when the sun shines on them, the buffy-colored bears appear white. This is the reason why Mexicans believe that two species of grizzly bears occur in the mountains, giving the name of oso blanco to the light colored ones, and oso plateado to the others. Also they often call either a dark grizzly, or a cinnamon colored black bear oso alesan [alazan]."

Thus, we have the derivation from the Spanish, the color (a sort of cinnamon) and the time when the word came into English. Thus, in order to get this word right, and it proved too much for our speller, the person might have to know alazan and then the way that it is "converted" into alesan and taken over into English. You just have to learn this one, I am afraid...

Achkan

Though this word isn't generally known, it is "a long coat worn by men in India." The 14th edition of the Britannica first brought it to our language in 1911: "Garments for outdoor wear are the achkan or sherwani...The achkan...is buttoned straight down the front. Both anga and achkan reach to a little below the knee." The Nehru jacket, all the rage in the 1960s, is a hip-length tailored coat for men or women, modeled on the South Asian achkan or sherwani. Here is an article/pictures of the Nehru jacket. I recall how excited my father was in the early 1960s when he got his first one....Here is an actual picture of the achkan, which, as you see, reaches down to the mid-calf.

Next Up...

Whoopee. We have made it now to Speller # 4. His words were ageusia, sigillation, edulcorate. I believe he only got the middle one right. These are all very good words, and I must pause here to praise the word-selectors for this bee. They had the knack of choosing words of significance and heft. This is unlike the National Senior Bee, which I have participated in for four years. Because we use a smaller dictionary for that bee, and it is a dictionary with lots of obscure pharmaceutical and old Scottish terms which no one knows, we end up being quizzed on irrelevancies in the Senior Bee. But these words from Seattle all have good, solid meanings and can be used in a number of circumstances. If you know your Latin and Greek roots they all are easy. Let's go one at a time.

The "a" in ageusia is the alpha privative, negating what is to come. Then, geusis is, in Greek, the sense of taste. The word ageusia first appears in English in the 19th century. But its more familiar appearance in English was through the Latin word. When the word geusis came into Latin, it was picked up as gustus, meaning "taste." Thus, a gustatory delight is one that delights the sense of taste. Something gustoso is "tasty," but it is used in music to direct that a passage is to be rendered with taste, whatever that really means... Because the Greek word was so fully taken up in the Latin gustus, it didn't make it through to any other English words than ageusia. That may have been the reason why the speller looked nonplussed when confronting this word. I bet he would have gotten "gusto," but, then again, gusto would not have been a third-round word.

Sigillation is fun, easy and meaningful. It is "the act of sealing; the fact of being sealed; the impression of a seal." Lying behind the word is the Latin sigillum, seal, which has nothing to do with creatures that can balance balls on their noses. We even have the word sigil in English to denote a seal or signet; in "old days" you had a "sigil-mark." One could have a "sigil of one's ring," since the ring was often used to seal a document. There are lots of words in English relating to sigil and sigillation (sigilled, sigillistic, sigillate, etc.), but the most fascinating one I found was sigilism. We have this usage from 1865: "The following appear to be the principal crimes against which the edicts of the Inquisition were fulminated..: immorality in the confessional, sigilism (or revealing the secrets of the confessional). Oh-oh. I could tell you why the word sigilism refers to the confessional--because you are breaking the "seal" of confession, but I am really interested, I hesitate to say, in what is meant by "immorality in the confessional."

So, of course, I had to do a little research on the subject. It turns out that one of the most famous/infamous works of 19th century pornography was written by a Protestant named Henry Scott. Entitled "The Confessional Unmasked," this 1868 tract didn't originate the genre but continued popular propaganda against the Roman Catholic church by positing the confessional as the place for "sex-talk," and maybe more. I checked and saw that there is no library in my region (the Northwest) which has a copy of this book. I wonder how far I would have to go to get a copy... Well, this is sure a long step from sigillation, isn't it? But that word opened up unexpected worlds and I, for one, wanted to look in on these worlds, if just for a moment.

Indeed, I ended up learning a new word by digging deeper into the word surrounding the quote just above. As I read an account of the reception in England of Mr. Scott's pamphlet, I realized that Charles Dickens, the leading author of the day, had just written Our Mutual Friend (1865). He invented a character in that book, Mr. Podsnap, who represented "insular complacency" and "blinkered self-satisfaction." He also would be the kind of person who would pursue with a vengeance writers of pornography. By presenting Mr. Podsnap as he did, Dickens held up to ridicule as "Podsnappery" all those attempts to define and prosecute what people at his time characterized as pornography.

This essay has gone on long enough, and if I let my mind wander down the OED page, I would run into Podunk and other words that would completely take me off my "game." Therefore, let's rest here, and pick up on more words from the Re-bar bee soon.

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