Spelling bee and galvanize and gadarene and free enterprise

Well, let's just do one more (and briefer) essay on the 26 pages I studied today (pp.490-515) from the 11th ed. of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. As I said in the previous essay, my study of words both teaches me new ones which I need to learn how to spell, but also tells me the origins of other words or phrases that fire the imagination. Let's talk briefly about a few more words.

The Wizard of Oz

My favorite childhood movie was the Wizard of Oz. I watched it so many times that I memorized most of the lines and, to this day, I even know them better than most biblical quotations, which I tried hard to sink deeply into my mind beginning in 1970. A phrase from the Wizard's verbal assault on the Tin Man has always stayed with me, and a word studied today brought it back. The word I studied today was "fuliginous" and means "sooty, obscure, murky" or "having a dark or dusky color." The word is derived from the Latin word for soot. Ok. But don't you remember the screed of the Wizard against the Tin Man: "You clinking, clattering collection of colligenous junk." Only thing is, colligenous isn't either in my dictionary or the OED. Colligate is in the OED, and it means to fasten to attach, and so the word "colligenous" might mean something to do with the adhesive character of the junk, but the word colligenous appears not to be attested. So, did the Wizard really slip and say "fuliginous" instead? I don't know, but I now know I have mastered that word!

More on Free/Full/Fund

I was interested to see that "full-timer" originated in 1868 but that "full-time" as an employment concept apparently wasn't attested until 1898. But the earlier date for its origin makes sense. The American industrial revolution had really gotten started in the Slater Mills (RI) and the Lynn (MA) factories in the 1840s. But it took a while for the concept of a work day to emerge after that. Earlier, of course, one would work from dawn to dusk in general, or one would be at the beck and call of the "master" as one did one's work. But the presence of the machine led to a new understanding of work. The Civil War intervened, but immediately thereafter the production in northern factories skyrocketed. With that happening, one certainly would need full-timers, don't you think?

And then, there are fundamentalists, aren't there? Jesus may have said, 2000 years ago, that the poor you will always have with you, but I think if Jesus were alive today he would say that the fundamentalists you will always have with you. They have always been around, but it was not until 1922 that the word first appeared. Actually, and I know this independently of any dictionary, when the "liberal assault" on the inerrancy of the Scripture began in this country in the 1880s, the conservatives wanted to have a way to fight back. So, early in the 20th century a pair of CA businessmen, the Stewart brothers, if I recall, decided to secure the services of orthodox Christian scholars who would put out a series of tracts or small books on the "Fundamentals" of the faith. These appeared from about 1905-1920 and covered the five "fundamental" beliefs--the virgin birth of Christ, the substitutionary atonement, the reality of miracles, the second coming of Christ and the full inspiration of the Bible. Those who adhered to these tenets, and who also were rather militant is so holding, would be dubbed "fundamentalists." It was only shortly after the term was coined in 1922 that HL Mencken, covering the Scopes "Monkey Trial" in Dayton, TN in 1925, caricatured the fundamentalist in ways that still resonate with the dominant culture. Be sure to differentiate a fundamentalist from a funambulist--the latter is a tight-rope walker. But if you say them together very rapidly and mumble, they sound almost alike!

Then, there are the additional words with "free"--such as free riders or free enterprise. I like "freehold" the best, because it reminds me of a departed colleague in law, Professor Robert Art. He was my property law teacher when I attended law school in the late 1990s. When he had finished his long and stimulating lectures on the "fee simple" and "fee tail" and "life estates," he closed his presentation by saying, "Here concludes my treatment of freehold estates." I will never forget him or him saying this.

I also found my mind wandering when I read about "fungo"--of course referring to a bat (1926) which was fatter in the middle and longer in length and designed especially for hitting fly balls to players to warm them up. The memory I have of "fungo," however, goes back to the first domed stadiums for baseball, in the early 1960s. People were worried that the domes simply wouldn't be high enough. People like Mickey Mantle would hit towering fly balls that would run into the dome and then he would have homers taken away from him. That is what worried people. I remember a news story that said that various fungo hitters tried to hit a ball against the dome, and only Ed Roebuck, whom the paper called [I still remember it] a "top fungo hitter" was able to "nick" the dome. Only problem was, Roebuck was a great fungo hitter but couldn't hit a real ball to save himself. I think he had a lifetime batting average well under .100, which was acceptable for a pitcher in those days. So, maybe that was my first acquaintance with irony. This "top fungo hitter" was only useful when he hit in practice and not in the game.

A Few Picturesque Words

I'll close this quickly because I really do believe that I could go on forever. Two words that were strikingly visual for me were gadarene and galvanize/galvanic. The former, of course, comes from the Gadarene demoniac in Mark 8, from whom the demons departed and then took over a herd of swine that then plunged off a cliff. Gadara was a town near the Sea of Galilee. But the dictionary informs me that it is now used in adjectival form synonymous with headlong or precipitate, so that one can have a "gadarene rush to the cities." I think that word might be useful in a number of contexts today, don't you?

Finally, I learned that the word "galvanize," meaning to subject to the action of an electric current or to stimulate or excite as if by an electric current, goes back to Luigi Galvani, whose work with electric currents did not go unrecognized.

Conclusion

I certainly don't know how prepared I will be for tomorrow's Bee, but I sure am having fun in the process. The reason I ultimately like an adult rather than a kids bee is that the adults at least should have some awareness of the richness to which the words point. Though there is a good deal of memorization, it is enrichment learning. So, I go to my next activity of the day feeling enriched. That is especially good, since the markets have been plummeting since the first of the year.