Final Words--1997 Spelling Bee I

A rerun of the 1997 Scripps Howard Spelling Bee was playing on Christmas Day, as I recall, and I followed it with great interest. These essays tell about the last rounds, with special attention to the inspired speller Rebecca Sealfon. The purpose of this and the next few essays is to introduce the 50 or so words in the final rounds. Any day you can learn new words or refresh your mind with difficult, but familiar, ones is a good day for me.

Plowing Through The List

I should have made a notation of the words on which the various kids foundered, but I didn't. Here are about 20 that were cited. I will give them here and then define a few. We had morceau, discalced, syzygy, nastaliq, anabibazon, cichlid, boutonniere, apastron, apsidal, cepheid, longirostrine, souterrain, quodlibet, vitrescible, helobious, demegoric, hypokalemia, nephalism, gramineous, entrecote, hippogriff, turbinado, stertorous and patois. This should more than get us started. I think a few of the terms are unfair. No one, in my judgment, would get nastaliq correct. What is it? Well, as the OED says, it is "A Persian script developed in the 14th-15th cent., combining features of the naskhi and taliq scripts, characterized by curving forms and groups of connecting letters written sloping slightly downwards." Of course, a combination of naskhi and taliq! As Don Adams used to say in Get Smart!, "That's the second time I've fallen for that this month!"

Well, even if you knew the origin of the term, and I would venture to say that most native Iranians wouldn't know it, you would have to contend with the history of its English-language spelling. Originally known as "Nestalick" (1677), the word gradually morphed to "Nustaleek" (1795), Nashk-ta'lyq (1854), "Nestalik" (1879), "Nastalich" (1886) before the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1957 spelled it as "nastaliq." Thus, if my reading had only progressed to 1795, for example, I would have spelled the word incorrectly, even though it would have been an attested spelling.

Is this an example of extreme pendantry or what? Nevertheless, I am grateful because it gave me an opportunity to dive into the word. Who knows whether in five years I will be studying the history of the Persian script on my way to Rumi and others. I also think longirostrine is an unfortunate and picky word. The OED doesn't even have it. There are only about 185 "hits" on Google with the words longirostrine (which means long-jaw) and jaw. Truly it is an obscure word. I love the words, however, with which it appears. We have statements like "longirostrine crocodyliforms" or "longirsotrine eusuchian." The crocodile is the ideal type of a longirostrine(d?) creature. But, why would anyone say longirostrine when you can say "long-jawed"? Well, probably because someone would say "dolichocephalian" when all you need to say is "thin-headed." But I also learned another word--brevirostrine-- to mean a "short-jaw." I suppose, on further reflection, that one could develop a long insult based on longirostrine and dolichocephalian, with something about tragus or glabella or a philtrum thrown in, but I am sure that the spelling bee folk didn't have this in mind for me.

A Digression on "Brevi"

Oh-oh. What I feared might happen has indeed happened. I write one word, longirostrine, which takes me naturally to brevirostrine (by the way, a "rostrum" is a "beak" in Latin), and then I want to dive into "brevi," meaning "brief," and never come up for air. Well, thankfully, the OED only lists about 10 or so English words that have a "brevi," beginning so I can be appropriately brief (!) in my description of some of them. Oops, spoke too soon again. The Century, put together about 100 years ago just as scientific terminology was exploding, has many, many more brevi-terms, mostly derived from scientific usage, and I think I have to give you some of these, too. Well, how do we start?

Not to be long, which runs in my family, let's begin with the legal phrase "brevi manu." It is a phrase (lit. "with short hand") used in Scots law to mean "on one's own authority" or "without legal warrant." The magistrate is entitle to issue the writ brevi manu." This Latin phrase has morphed into "sua sponte" in law, where a court often can order something "of its own will," without waiting for legal briefs on a question. The phrase "brevi manu traditio" also appears in the Civil Law tradition, and so is well-attested in Google in Italian, German and some Slavic languages.

Well, let's return with the word breviloquence. We know of the word "eloquence" and "grandiloquence," and so breviloquence simply means a brief or laconic way of speaking. Lincoln's "Gettsburg Address was a specimen of pithy breviloquence." Perhaps this is something that you ought to say to one of the loquacious people around the office. "Hey, guy, a little more breviloquence, please..."

Finishing with the Breviary

This really won't finish my treatment on "brevi," but it will for this essay. The Breviary, in the Roman Catholic Church, is a book containing the "Divine Office" for each day, which clergy in Major Orders are required to recite daily. It consists of prayers, collects, Psalms, excerpts from the Old and New Testament, quotations from the saints or Church Fathers and other short excerpts to aid the spiritual life. The word "breviarium" first occurred in the 11th century to denote the compendious nature of the material's arrangement. Breviary, also, can mean a summary or epitome of something, even though the OED tells us that this usage is "obsolete."

I like the figurative usage of "breviary," to mean a summary or epitome of something sacred, even if this "sacred" thing is quite "secular." From 1877 we have: "Montaigne of Bordeaux..whose sprightly 'Essays', more Pagan than Christian, have been styled the breviary of free thinkers." Or, from 1878, in Morley's biography of Diderot, he has, "She habitually called the Spirit of Laws (by Montesquieu in 1748) the breviary of Kings." We normally speak of something like this as the "Bible of X" (I recall that the magazine Track and Field News called itself the "Bible of the Sport" in the late 1960s), but I think I would like to re-inject "breviary" into our speech. Then, to end in complete obscurity, there was such a document known as the Breviary of Alaric, a compilation of written and unwritten laws of Rome, made by Alaric II of the Visigoths in 506. Don't rush out to buy it...

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