1997 Kids Bee and Words

The purpose of this and the next (final!) essay is to examine several words used in the final rounds of the 1997 kids Bee. As I have previously said, many of them don't even appear in the OED and are so obscure as to be impossibly difficult. This and the next essay will begin by listing the last 30 or so words from the Bee, then move into French-derived words and then conclude with a few very useful words from the list.

Additional words from the 1997 Bee were oculogyric, demiurge, soavemente, internecine, desquamate, passementerie, onychosis, palynological, solenoid, pignorate, lederhosen, filiciform, penury, chautauqua, bruit, canicular, sansculottic, embouchure, vernissage, holophytic, sufflaminate, foudroyant, deliquesce, philhellene, bourgade, griffonage, anglophilia, cortile, coterie and the winning word euonym. When we add them to this list, we have the words that mowed down the field from about 12 spellers to a winner. Let's take apart both of these lists for a moment.

French-Derived Words

It seems to be a truism that if you want to do well in the Bee, you need to study French. From my perspective it was interesting that the 2006 Bee had several German words in the final rounds, knocking out the "favored" speller as well as others, but there was only one explicitly German word in the last 50 words of the 1997 Bee--and that was the trivially simple lederhosen. Only two Italian words appeared near the end: (A) soavemente and (B) cortile. The French-derived words are: (1) morceau; (2) boutonniere; (3) souterrain; (4) entrecote; (5) patois; (6) passementerie; (7) sanscullotic; (8) embouchure; (9) vernissage; (10) foudroyant; (11) bourgade; and (12) griffonage. It really is quite an amazing list once you think about it. We only use one of these words--(2) with any regularity in our language, though (5) is familiar to most, (8) is common if you play the trumpet, and (3) is familiar to those who build fortifications. Well, let's pore over the other French terms briefly. Morceau has three OED definitions: a short literary or musical composition; a small piece or fragment of anything; a choice dish or delicacy or a morsel of food. From 1877: "One little morceau of scenery seems to lead naturally to the next." Or, from 1844: "The pice of fat in it called the Pope's eye, is considered a delicate morceau by epicures" (I hope you know what an epicure is!).

More French Words

Literally meaning "under the earth, a souterrain is an underground chamber or store room. The French word is spelled identically to the English. "In the souterrain of vaulted stone, the military engines and stores were deposited." I recall being in a souterrain last summer in a fort at Nassau, Bahamas when I was taking a cruise in the Caribbean. "Entrecote" literally means "between ribs," and an entrecote steak is a boned steak cut off the sirloin. It has been known in English for 150 or so years. From 1877 we have: "The rib-steak or entrecote, cut from the ribs of beef." So, from French military skill to culinary competence, we now move to its decorative skill in the word passementerie. The French word is identical and dates from the 16th century, though it didn't come into English until the 17th. Passementerie is "decorative trimming of gold or silver lace or (later) of braids, beads or other material. The New Yorker used the word in 1960: "I rummaged through stalls laden with Victorian knicknacks, pewter..and miscellaneous rubbish of every description from passementerie to door knobs. This word was used again in the 2006 kids Bee, and the Senior Bee used it, too, so I would advise you to become friends with passementerie.

Oops, I skipped patois, but everyone knows or should know that it is a regional dialect. Linguists have shunned the word now in favor of "dialect," but it is stubbornly used by those of us who are suspicious of the occasional false precision of "scientific terminology." Sansculottic is actually a very useful term because of its association with the French Revolution. Culottes were breeches, and sansculottic literally means "without breeches." Today it can mean either "revolutionary," as in "sansculottic schemes," or not-well-dressed. Carlyle was the first to use it in the latter sense in 1833: "He is utterly unclean, scandalous, shameless, sansculottic-samoeidic." I can see another digression coming, but I will restrain myself. "The older generation objected to the sansculottic attire of the 1960s crowd." I think the word has possibilities today.

Your embouchure is the "disposition" of your lips, tongue and other organs necessary for producing a musical tone." I know this word well because my younger brother Chris took trumpet lessons for years, and he used to walk around the house muttering (at age 10) that he needed to get his embouchure together. Unfortunately, I think I got the word but he never got his embouchure competely together. A vernissage is "a day before the exhibition of paintings on which exhibitors may retouch and varnish their pictures already hung." Though this meaning goes back to 1912 it is now used to indicate a private viewing before the public exhibition. Very nice to know this.

We still have three words to go: foudroyant, bourgade and griffonage. I confess that I missed foudroyant, which I wouldn't have missed had I been more fluent in French. The English word is identical to the French, and it means "thundering, stunning, noisy, flashing, dazzling." Foudre is the French word for lightning. One can have a "foudroyant style" of an organist or a "foudroyant fireworks" on the 4th of July. I suppose the word could be coupled with anything one might find stunning, even if such examples are not readily forthcoming in literature. Here is a pleasant, short exposition of the word. Let's pledge to use it. I can dispense of bourgade much more quickly, as the OED tells us that it is now an "alien" word referring only to France. What is it? Well, by its name we see it is a village or, in this case, a little village or township. I question the use of the term in the kids' Bee. Who really will ever use it in English. Let's conclude with griffonage. It is neatly defined in the OED as "scribble." French has the same word, meaning the same thing, derived from griffonner--to write badly or scrawl. I wonder why one of the "n's" dropped out in going from the verb to noun form in French. In any case, we could use it in a sentence like the following: "There was a heap of little crumpled bills which, with Felicie's griffonage, Helen had thrown into her table-drawer." Instead of telling someone that his or her scrawl is indecipherable, why don't we say that we can't decipher the griffonage? I think it will get you much further in life if you do...

The next essay completes my consideration of the 1997 Bee's final words.

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