At the Re-bar Bee; Essay Five of the Words

Speller # 4 also missed edulcorate. If you knew that the word meant "to sweeten," and that the Latin behind it was e or "out of" and dulcor, which means "sweet," you have it made. In fact, if you just think of all the word suggesting sweetness that begin with the root dulc, you will be overwhelmed. There is dulcamara, a pharmaceutical name for the bittersweet, Solanum Dulcamara, a common hedge-plant throughout Europe and the US. Amarus is the Latin word for "bitter." Then, dulcamarin is a glucoside obtained from the bittersweet. Dulce is a verb meaning "to make sweet" or to "soothe," and if someone has a dulcet voice it is exquisite, melodious or harmonious. From Don Quixote we have Dulcinea, a word used in several kids spelling bees of late. The Century even has dulciloquy, a sweet manner of speaking. The dulcimer, a musical instrument consisting of a body shaped like a trapezium, over which are stretched a number of metallic strings, is derived from the Latin dulce melos, a sweet song, where melos is further derived from the Greek word for song. Dulcitude is sweetness and dulcoration is the act of sweetening. Thus, while I can understand how a person might replace the "o" of edulcorate with an "e," there really is no reason to do so...

To Speller # 5

Randy, the guy who invited me to come up to Seattle, was speller # 5. He missed two of the three words in the following list (would you have missed any of these?): praseodymium, shibboleth, bathyorographical. He hadn't run into the first word, which is pretty common if you study gems and chemistry, but his mistake on the last word was the result of a bad guess, which he knows he shouldn't have made (putting an "a" for the second "o"). Praseodymium is chemical element with atomic number 59. Discovered in the mid-1880s, it was named after C.A. von Welsbach's word Praseodym. Didymium (the last two syllables of praseodymium are derived from it) is a rare metal, discovered by Mosander in 1841 that is found only in association with cerium and lanthanium. It derived its name from a close association (i.e., a "twinness") with lanthanium, which had itself been discovered by Mosander around 1840. Lanthanum/lanthanium was originally called Lantanum by Mosander from the Greek word lanthanein (to lurk) because it "has hitherto lain concealed in oxide of cerium..." I don't know much about chemistry, but I would love to see Lantanum/lanthanum/lanthanium lurking right now, wouldn't you? I went on this little word journey to show how even learning the names of chemical elements can provide a delightful meal.

Well, back to praseodymium. We have two words in it, praseo, derived from the classical Greek word prasios ("leek-green") and dymium ("twin"). Thus, we can expect this soft, silvery-white (where is the leek-green?) metallic chemical element used in mischmetal and some other alloys to impart a yellow color to glass and ceramics. Apparently the color of its salts is leek-green. Prase, by the way, is a green varity of quartz. It is called "dymium" because of its location with neodymium, atomic number 60. By the way, here is the 1885 quotation describing the discovery of praseodymium: "By repeated crystallization of a mixture of the double nitrates of lanthanum and didymium with ammonium, the lanthanum salt was obtained pure, whilst the didymium salt separated into the salts of two new elements, neodymium and praseodymium."

If you need some chemical knowledge to hit praseodymium out of the park, you need biblical knowledge again to understand shibboleth. It was the Hebrew word used by Jephthah as a test word to distinguish the fleeing Ephraimites (who couldn't pronounce the sh) from his won men, the Gileadites (story in Judges 12). Wyclif used it in this sense in his 1382 translation of Jud. 12:6. Now it is most popularly used as "catchword or formula adopted by a party or sect by which their adherents or followers can be discerned," a usage first attested in the 17th century.

Randy was kicking himself for misspelling bathyorographical. The word rarely appears, even on a Google search, and means "in oceanography, of or relating to ocean depths and mountain heights." But how, really, would you use the term and in what context was it invented? Well, I had to do some searching but I came up with the title of a 1939 book: "Bathyorographical Map of China." But this work doesn't seem just to deal with oceanographical subjects, for the reviewer says this: "This new map, drawn on a scale of 1:3,000,000 and 1.8 by 1.4 meters in size, covers not only China proper but the outlying border regions as well--Tibet and part of Burma, Chinese Central Asia, and Mongolia, Manchuria, and Korea." He speaks of how the cartographers had to move "deeper and deeper into the interior of the country," which is hardly what you would expect oceanographers to do... This map seems to emphasize the basic physical features of the country, extending from the "depths," (bathy) to the "mountains" (oros).

Speller # 6

The sixth speller got the last two words right of these three: purpresture, aigrette, chaparral. I think that the last one was a sort of 'gimme,' since they accepted either chaparral or chapparal as proper spellings. There was a TV show, very popular in its day, called "The High Chaparral." Here is the web site for the show. It may have appeared before the word-selectors were born; hence they may have thought, mistakenly in my judgment, that the word was a "difficult" word. If you have the online edition of the OED, the "home page" has the word purpresture on it. Suffice it to say that it, like litiscontestation, is a term from our common law legal heritage. Purpresture means "an illegal enclosure of or encroachment upon land or property belonging to another or to the public; an appropriation of land or property for private purposes." When I first ran into this word a few months ago, I did some legal research to distinguish an action for purpresture from the common law action for nuisance. The key difference is an encroachment per se, whereas nuisance requires some kind of, well, nuisance....

Finally, the other word that speller # 6 got right was aigrette. It can refer to the Lesser White Heron (egret--1845). It also is associated with the tuft of feathers such as borne by the Egret and other birds, and the "feathery pappus of composite plants like the Dandelion." Finally, it means "a spray of gems, or similar ornament, worn on the head."

We are moving along, but we still have about a dozen spellers to go....

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