Is your vocabulary better than a 7th--grader's?

You have probably realized that I think about Spelling Bee words all year long. I had a really good one the other day--funambulist. I thought this would be a word nobody in my family knew, so naturally I tried to stump them by asking them what they thought it meant--over breakfast, when nobody here is really firing on all pistons.

Wouldn't you know it: my smart-aleck middle son replied, without skipping a beat, "It means tightrope-walker." Apparently funambulist is a word directly borrowed from Latin, where it means just that.



Oh, darn!



It might make the list anyway, even though my vocabulary is evidently NOT better than a 7th-grader's.

While you are enjoying your summer vacation....

I am already collecting words for the 09 Bee. I just subscribed to the RSS feed from A Word A Day (www.wordsmith.org) --one of my absolute favorite Bee word sources, but I grew weary of the daily e-mail. The RSS feed will place the words gently into my computer without loading up my inbox.

Check out today's word, and imagine our fearless MC George Doherty delivering it to a roomful of Dover's most competitive spellers: http://wordsmith.org/words/callipygian.html.

Enjoy!