Spelling Bees II and gall wasp and gangsta and merriam webster collegiate dictionary

I just couldn't wait any longer. Instead of waiting until April 22, as I said in a previous essay, to begin to do my "26 pages a day" review of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), I decided to go through 26 pages today. The Oregon Bee is tomorrow, and I figured I would see if 26 pages was doable and tolerable for me and if I found a method in studying that would also lead to some writing afterwards. Here is my first "experiment" with that.

The Method

I chose, randomly, pages 490-516 to master. It took me 55 minutes to work through these pages, and I made a list of about 40 words that I will need to study further. I notice that a lot of them are of French origin. I never studied French in a classroom, and although I had to be able to pass a French reading test in doctoral work, which I managed to muddle through, I have never really devoted the attention to that language (yet) that it deserves. Now it is coming back to haunt me. For example, several of the 40 words I think I need to study from these pages (f-g) are French. A "formee" cross is one with arms narrow at the center and expanding towards the ends; while a "fourchee" cross is a cross with each arm forked. I would show you a diagram, but I don't want to take up space here. Or, a fourragere (pronounced furazher) is the braided cord hanging from the shoulder that is frequently worn on military uniforms. Fouette (fwetay) is a move or step in ballet. Well, I guess I will have to get the hang of them.

Most of the words I need to master, hwoever, are not particularly difficult words but are just those that are not familiar to me. This statement may be reminiscent of the statement that all languages aren't difficult once you learn them, but words like "gamine" (a playful girl) or "galleass" (large galley) or "fumet" (a kind of meat or fish), "fylfot" (a swastika) or "fugu" (pronounced fyugu, a kind of fish) are those that you just have to learn. Sometimes Japanese loan words are very easy, such as "gagaku," which is court music in Japan or "gaijin," which is a foreigner, but sometimes I think I could get tripped up by Japanese words fairly easily. Well, you just have to study and master and hope you can remember more than you forget!

Diversions

But as I was studying the words, I realized that I was beginning to have fun. The fun derived from two sources. First, the dictionary has the dates when the term was first used in English. This enables me to "imagine" that period of time and come up with a plausible explanation for why the term arose when it did. It shows the way that language grows; it is cobbled together by people who invent terms because of new physical or technological realities ("email" is the most prominent neologism) such as a "garden apartment (1946)"--a multiple-unit low-rise dwelling having considerable lawn or garden space." Couldn't you just hear the real estate developers after WWII talking to the returning veterans, who just got married and were wanting to "settle down" on their meager incomes to a comfortable and more pleasant life than their parents had enjoyed? What better way than to have a "garden apartment" with lawns and a flower bed or two? So, studying words can therefore fire my imagination.

Second, the dates tend to create pictures for me. For example, the word "freebase" came up in these pages, which relates to a purified solid form of cocaine (origin in 1980), and the clearest memory I have is from the early 1980s, shortly after it was coined, when comedian Richard Pryor burned himself badly because, as the news stories had it, he was "freebasing cocaine." Thanks, Richard, for helping to fix a word and concept deep in my memory. Or, one has a number of words in the "free category" that send off fireworks in my memory. There is the "freedom ride," from which year? You guess? Yep, 1961, commemorating the ride made by civil rights leaders in the south to try to open up public facilities (like busses and hotels) to all races. "Freedom fighters" go back to 1942, though the word got a lot of workout in the 1980s as we were trying to determine whether the Sandanistas, for example, were freedom fighters or rebels. Indeed, "freedom fighters" have sort of fallen out of use lately as the vocabulary of terrorism is front and center. Oh, by the way, "front and center" only came to us in 1951, though this dictionary doesn't explain why. Maybe it was because people were called to the front in a "game show," which itself made a debut in 1958, but this wouldn't explain the seven year gap.

But you could be endlessly diverted with times in which words arose. Gangsta rap comes out of 1990, even if some people wish it would never have arisen. But "gang bang" has an interesting history. It originated in 1945 with an "often vulgar" meaning of "copulation by several persons in succession with the same passive partner" [if the partner is 'active,' is it still a 'gang bang'?], but because "gang bang" then was taken over in the general culture to refer not simply to sexual activity but to "participate in especially violent gang activity," and then, because the general culture DOES take over words, styles and mannerisms of the "gangster" subculture, to refer to lesser assaults, it kind of loses its original sting. So, what does language do? It invents "gang rape" in 1969 to sort of restore the original meaning of gang bang, which by 1969 could be used by anemic white people just to mean a tepid atttack on someone or something.

A Concluding Word

I thought nothing of "gall wasp" (1879) until I thought, 'Oh, gall wasps. Yes, that is what Alfred Kinsey studied and wrote a book on before he got into sex. Indeed, the method he chose to study these wasps, through the meticulous clasification and examination of hundreds of thousands of them, was useful when he turned to the study of sex. Surveys and interviews, taken by nonjudgmental interviewers, would be the order of the day.

So, as I conclude this essay, I think that I am writing not primairly about frisee and fritillaria and frugivorous and fulguration, which are words I need to learn, but I am writing about words that create a vivid picture for me. Well, anything to learn the words, right?