More New Free Rice Words--With Some Principles of My Spelling

Yesterday, while minding my own business, I received an email from someone who puts on the CBS Evening News, informing me that they wanted to do a story on me before the National Spelling Bee next month. Though I don't receive such calls very often, I was rather astonished at my own reaction to the call. It was rather "ho-hum." Not that I deserved it or that it was late in coming; rather, I felt it was just something I had to "schedule in" my life, like everything else. When I told friends about it, however, they were ecstatic--something similar to if I had won the lottery (which I don't even play), I suppose. So, I began to think about what I would say in such an interview; no doubt the reporter will have lots of questions for me. After all, they get paid to keep conversations going. But the occasion of an upcoming interview allowed me the luxury to think for a moment on why I am so fascinated with words. Here, and in the next essay, are Bill's Five Principles about Words, which include some examples of new words--every essay should have some "learning component" to it.

First Principle

My first and most beloved principle is that words open worlds. Before we meet a new word, we are often completely unaware that the world where it finds it greatest usage even exists. For example, I don't believe that I had run into the word boomslang until a few days ago. It is an Afrikaans word, meaning "tree snake." Its Linnaean name is Dispholidus typus, from the Colubridae family. So I did what I almost always do when I run into a new creature for me--I check it out on the animal "facebook"--Google "images." And, here is a picture of him, with a lot of words describing his life, from "Reptile Knowledge." What I first encountered as a vocabulary word now turned into a journey for me. I learned that it was, for the writer of the website, "one of the most interesting snakes in the world." It is an extremely agile green snake, capable of climbing trees and gliding through branches in search of its next meal. Though I am not throwing out all my life's trainings to become a herpetologist, I was enlarged and engaged in mind and heart through learning about the boomslang.

Second Principle

The second important idea for me is that words lead to words. Just as they open worlds in and of themselves, they often become the means for your eyes to wander "down the page" and learn something about a subject you never studied previously. An example from today is the word camlet-- a name originally applied to a beautiful and costly eastern fabric, afterwards to imitations of this fabric. In the 17th century, I learned, it was made of the hair of an Angora goat. Well, while looking at camlet, my eye fell on camerlengo (OED's preferred is camerlingo, but the Merriam Webster only has the former spelling; thus I will use it for "spelling bee prep." purposes). Camerlengo is the Italian word for chamberlain, and its most prominent meaning is "The Pope's chamberlain and financial secretary; the highest officer in the papal household." But then, I decided to dig a little deeper and learned that Camerlengo Carlo Ventresca was a fictional character in Dan Brown's popular 2000 novel Angels and Demons. I never read that book and only reluctantly read (and commented on) the Da Vinci Code (the movie) in 2006. But just think---had I been a fan of Dan Brown, I would easily have learned about a camerlengo far before I stumbled upon it today. Well, upon second thought, this is one word I don't mind stumbling upon...

Third Principle

But the experience with camerlengo leads me to my third point--and that is that every word is trivially simple for someone, and that someone often is a person who is not necessarily of high intellectual or academic achievement. The fact that I don't know their words and worlds is thus a lesson to me in humility--to broaden my horizons and learn from those who know. For example, I hadn't heard the word scupper before studying some freerice.com words. The OED defines it as a ship's drain, but the word is now used to describe any kind of "fall off" or "drainage" structure. For example, this web page, which sells precast products in Phoenix, has a whole "quarry scupper series" of little fountains dribbling down to lower cups. They are the modern "scuppers," I suppose. Anyone who works for that company, no matter how humble or unlearned, knows what a scupper is. I didn't. Once it really dawns on us that each word is trivially simple to someone, we really have no excuse for not learning the word. Simple as that.

I have a few more principles, which I will unpack, along with more words, in the next essay.

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