Taking One Page of the Unabridged--page 313

This essay expresses frustration and longing. First, the frustration. Spelling bee words are usually derived from this dictionary, which was most recently "updated" in 2002 (mine is the 1993 edition). Unabridged dictionaries are supposed to contain "all" the words in the language, but this statement is as false as the New York Times slogan: "All the News that's Fit To Print." Well, the NY Times used to be a great newspaper, before the Jason Blair and Judy Miller and Whitewater investigations, and indeed under Bill Keller's lead it is now returning, in my judgment, to being a great paper, but its slogan is obviously false. It is like those books that have come out recently regarding a certain edition of the Britannica Encyclopedia which recorded "all there was to know;" it is like those scholars who were in vogue about a decade ago claiming that there was a time (at the end of the Middle Ages) when one could know "all there was to know." Each of these claims is so patently false as not even to deserve rebuttal. Suffice it to say that knowledge readily accessible to an educated European in those days could be put in a library of a few thousand volumes and might be "known." That this is "all there is to know," however, is worse than a falsehood. One could also know the worlds of Islam and Confucianism, the sacred books of the Middle and Far East and loads of other things.

Frustration--Continued

Back to the Unabridged dictionary. This dictionary is the "basis" of "all" the words in the language, words that can be used in a spelling bee. But when you actually look at a page, and when you apply the rules of a spelling bee, you see that between 33% and 50% of the entries on a given page cannot be used in spelling bees. Why? Well, they are eliminated because they either are words with multiple spellings (denoted by "also" or "or"); words that have "variants"; words that are "double-words" (that is, they are either hyphenated or are themselves a concept with two or more words, such as a "forget-me-not" or, from page 313, a "cafe curtain" or "cake cooler." Some of the words, such as "cake" are given two entries, one as a noun and one as a verb. When you add all these words up, you discover that you can't use much of what is on the page before you. For example, the three columns of page 313 of the Unabridged contain 47, 46, and 38 entries; the last column alone has 19 entries that can't be used.

Thus, we ought to be clear what a spelling bee is. It is a quiz on single words in our language for which there is, in the Unabridged, no disputed or variant spelling. I say it like this because there are loads of words which have two spellings in the Unabridged which only have one spelling in the Collegiate (the dictionary of the Senior Spelling Bee) and vice versa. For example, as I was studying page 313 of the Unabridged, my eye fell over to p. 312 and I saw the word caespitose or cespitose. It means "tufted" or "growing in clusters." But it only appears in the Collegiate as caespitose. Thus, it is fair game depending on which dictionary you use. It was used, for example in the 2007 Senior Bee while it couldn't be used in the Kids' Bee.

I also express frustration because we have another dictionary, the OED, supposedly the definitive dictionary of the English language, whose words corresponding to the Unabridged words on p. 313 differ considerably from those words. In short, we can't quite agree on what our language is, even though we give the impression through spelling bees that it is a fixed thing. Well, it is just a game, isn't it? This, then, expresses my frustration.

My Longing

Then there is my longing. Because I am committed to the notion that words open worlds, and since I would like to take the "cue" given me by the word to look into the world it opens, I am often very interested in the disputed-spelling words. This gets me "nowhere" with respect to bees, even though it broadens my horizons. It leads to my thought, which ought to be a Billphorism of sorts, that in order for me to be a good speller I have to learn three times as much as anyone else. But that is what I have always believed about myself. In order, for example, to understand the Bible, I found that I had to memorize large chunks of it, know the contents of every chapter of it without consulting the text and be basically familiar with the flow of all the arguments and the nature of all the stories in the Book.

Thus, my 2007 longing is to know "all the words," and the worlds to which the words point. I know that this is an impossible task, and that the dictionaries only get us to the very beginning of the task. Not only do they simply "point" to the concepts through the words, but they only list a few of the words that are actually in use in the various communities that use words (which is pretty much all of us). So, I do the dictionary because I like to compete and win spelling bees (it is nice to win something every once in a while!), but I do it only as a necessary evil to open up worlds before me.

Turning To Page 313

The Unabridged lists about 130 words in its three columns on page 313. We can't use about 35-40% of them. Thus, the number of words we actually can use in most spelling bees from page 313 is about 80-90. Fine. At least we have some words whose spelling doesn't seem to be disputed. But then, let's look at the list of words from "cafe curtain" to "caked breast" in the OED [note that the first and last words of p. 313 in the Unabridged are words that we can't use]. The OED lists 94 words between these two words, even though it has neither "cafe curtain" nor "caked breast" in it. Let's see how many of the OED's 94 words are represented in the Unabridged's 130 or so...in the next essay.

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