An Amusing Series of Words

2010 Bee contestant Will recently suggested we add terpsichorean to the Bee word list. The word means “pertaining to dance” and it comes from one of the nine muses, the one named Terpsichore. Will’s suggestion got me to thinking about Muses and who they were and why we have them.

The Muses were a mythical set of nine sisters, born of a union between Zeus and Mnemosyne (goddess of memory). According to Hesiod, who credits them with breathing into him his [inspired?] work Theogony, “their nature is forgetfulness of evil and rest from cares”. Zeus, says Hesiod, makes kings, but the Muses make artists--and it isn't too much of a stretch to imagine that Hesiod thinks the Muses have the better job. The Muses are more or less culture, personified. The Ancient Greeks assigned a variety of talents to these sisters, as follows:

Calliope: heroic poetry and epics
Clio: history
Erato: erotic poetry
Euterpe: flute accompaniments
Melpomene: tragedy
Polyhymnia: sacred songs
Terpsichore: Dance and choral singing
Thalia: festivity, music in general
Urania: the heavens, astronomy

According to my trusty and somewhat heretical The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (Barbara G. Walker, Harper & Row, 1983—it’s a wonderful read, I absolutely recommend it), the Muses were initially a triune female goddess, the Ideas (that’s deas as in deities). I guess they had too many talents for only three goddesses.

It’s engaging to read the list and think that these are the categories into which ancient Greeks sorted their cultural activities. I can understand a muse for sacred songs, dance, and even erotic poetry, but really--a goddess of flute accompaniments? If Euterpe lived in my household, she’d probably be the muse of competetive burping.

You can read through the list and see some obvious relationships between the goddesses’ names and English words which describe their areas of expertise. There’s a hymn in Polyhymnia, and Mnemosyne must have given us mnemonics. Erato sounds like erotic. Euterpe has the “eu” that marks euphemism and Eugene (it means “good” or “well”). And although we cannot see her without a telescope and some knowledge of her art, Urania lives on in the sky with the planet Uranus.

But things get murkier from there on out. Why is the steam-powered musical instrument named the Calliope? Well, the calli in Calliope means “beautiful” (Bee players of the past will remember the bonus word callipygian which means “having beautiful buttocks”). Calliope has a beautiful voice, which the Greeks dedicated to heroic poetry and recitation. The Clio awards keep that muse in annual parlance, although--unless you are very cynical--the notion of awards for excellence in advertising is not exactly representative of the original Clio’s intentions.

The ones that stumped me are Euterpe, Thalia and Terpsichore. Theoi.com explains that Terpsichore means “delight of dancing” and Euterpe means “giver of delight”, and goes on to tell us that the ancient Greek word terpein meant “delight”.

Thalia has the best name, I think: theoi.com tells us that it comes from a word used to describe banquets, and means “luxurious, rich, plentiful and abundant.” Someone should name a shampoo after her!

The Muses give us the word amusing, and, seeing the body of knowledge that they represent, it’s no surprise. How many mothers and fathers have amused their children, and have sung, danced, recited stories and nursery rhymes, and in the process provided their offspring with a cultural framework in which to grow up?

It would be lovely to think that the Muses live in museums, a word which is fairly new to English, according to Charles Hodgson, coming via Latin from the Greek museion or temple of the muses. However, scanning the list, I have my own idea: I think these days the Muses are living (or are imprisoned, maybe) on Cable TV. Think about it: we have the History Channel, A&E, and Showtime (choral singing + dance = musicals). Melpomene has the soap operas sewn up, and—well, we’ve already talked about Clio and her namesakes. Think about that the next time you pick up the remote and mutter “200 channels and nothing to watch”!

Thanks, Will, for the amusing excursion.

Happy New Words to you!

One of my favorite Christmas gifts this year is one that I found all by myself: the 365 New Words a Year calendar (compiled by Merriam Webster, Workman Publishing, ISBN 978-0-7611-5258-3). It'a a typical "word-a-day" calendar, but on the back of each page is a little "did you know?" about the word--a discussion regarding the pronunciation, how it came into English, its usage compared to other similar words, and the like. I'm happy to have a new source of Bee words, because we are aiming to have the list available by mid-February, and suddenly that seems just around the corner! Experienced Bee players will recognize a number of the words, but that shouldn't stop you from checking it out. Save yourself some consternation; a little bit of study each day should keep you from feeling compunctious on the last Thursday in March! After all, the Bee words are not going to land in your brain via afflatus, are they? Get to work; I am!

And if you find any interesting and challenging words along the way, send them to me here and I'll talk about them. (Next installment: terpsichorean, thanks to Will.)

If I could draw, I still wouldn't have been clever enough to do this...

My 13-year-old is often a good source of unusual vocabulary words, and this time I don't mean the type you'd typically associate with a teenage boy: he is the one who gave me "strigel" (the flat scraper that bathers of antiquity used--to scrape off the olive oil they washed with) and "funambulist" (see below, if you've forgotten that one). So it's really no surprise that he brought www.vocabularycartoons.com to my attention recently.

This is a very witty website, and they have similarly funny paperback, which my son shared with me. Here is the link on the Minuteman Library Network--you can order it and pick it up at your library: http://library.minlib.net/search/X?SEARCH=new+monic+books&searchscope=1
It is definitely worth a look. I'm going to mine it for Bee words.

A big THANK YOU goes to Park School English teacher Curt Miller, who introduced us to the Vocabulary Cartoons.

March 25, 2010!

The Selectmen approved our date for the Town House Great Hall.
Write it in your calendar!
More, here, as things develop.
See you!!

Here's another interesting source for Bee Words: the Phobia List

I found myself having to look up a word on line (anatidaephobia--it reportedly means fear of being watched by a duck, and one website I saw credits Far Side creator Gary Larson with its coinage--but I could not confirm that on the farside.com site). Looking through all that led to a very interesting website called the Phobia List (www.phobialist.com). Compiled by Fredd Culbertson as an outgrowth of his interest in words and etymology, this list organizes over 500 phobias by name and by definition. Looking through it, I couldn't find anatidaephobia or fear of anything to do with a duck, but it is a source of interesting and unusual words. Here's one for Bee players:
Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia- Fear of long words. I just might have to add that to the emergency word list for sudden death overtime!

This Boston Globe article reminds us all that spelling DOES count

Bad grammar trips up suspected identity thief - The Boston Globe

Posted using ShareThis

Can you imagine someone usurping your identity and then abusing the English language in your name? Yikes.

www.wordnik.com: a promising website for word-lovers

I subscribe to Charles Hodgson's podictionary.com RSS feeds, and found a link to this new site mentioned at the bottom of one of his entries. It looks great! Check it out yourself: go to www.wordnik.com, enter a word and see an interesting variety of information pertaining to it: pronunciation, etymology, common usage, and words with which your chosen word is often associated. The Wordnik.com creators describe it as "an ongoing project devoted to discovering all the words and everything about them", and they suggest that using their site might improve your Scrabble scores. It looks to me like the site would be a fun way to prepare for the 2010 Dover Town Library Spelling Bee. Who knows--maybe we'll find some new words there for our Bee players!

Maybe not a source of Bee words, but definitely worth a read if you like words

Former Library Trustee (and general braniac) Alison Piper is one of my secret weapons in the construction of the annual Bee word list. I sweat and fret, and then pass the list to Alison who gives it a once-over and easily points out many of my strategic errors. In years when the Bee contestants beat the word list, I turn to Alison's prepared "extra-hard Secret Killer Bee words", which yield gems such as 2007's odontalgia and 2009's gnorimoschema.

Alison sent me the link to Schott's Vocab's recent Tom Swifty contest, and I liked the site so much I decided to write about it in here. Here's the NYTimes website's description of Schott's Vocab:

Schott’s Vocab is a repository of unconsidered lexicographical trifles — some serious, others frivolous, some neologized, others newly newsworthy. Each day, Schott's Vocab explores news sites around the world to find words and phrases that encapsulate the times in which we live or shed light on a story of note. If language is the archives of history, as Emerson believed, then Schott’s Vocab is an attempt to index those archives on the fly.
Ben Schott is the author of “Schott’s Original Miscellany,” its two sequels, and the yearbook “Schott’s Almanac.” He is a contributing columnist to The Times’s Op-Ed page. He lives in London.
His Web site can be viewed at benschott.com, and his Opinion pieces here.

Today's word in Schott's Vocab is "funemployed"--people who are unemployed and enjoying it. You can subscribe to the feed on RSS and Twitter--it's worth a look.

Thanks, Alison!

More on the Scripps Bee

Amelia Slawsby sent me a great link to Newsweek's spelling bee coverage:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/198850

I love some of the words they highlighted, particularly akropodion (the most prominent part of the back of one's heel). Perhaps we'll have a body part category next year...antecubital, philtrum, akropodion...

For those of you who missed it in real time, check out the Scripps Bee website:
http://www.spellingbee.com/ I absolutely love the fact that a girl named Kavya won it--kavya was one of the Dover Bee words, and it refers to a type of Sanskrit poem. What a beautiful idea, to name one's child after a poetic work. (Notice that we don't see many kids named Ode, Limerick, Ditty or Haiku--but maybe the trend will catch, now that a Kavya has risen to fame in spelling.)

Word of the day (decade?): Oculogyrism

It means eye-rolling.

With thanks to Dr. Joseph Loscalzo, whose word skills have bolstered the Bee for a couple of years now, as a judge and as a word contributor.

Now, who can come up with an emoticon for eye-rolling? We have ;-) for a wink and >:-( for a scowl. How do we roll the eyes using the keyboard? Teenagers everywhere want to know....as do their parents, surely.

National Spelling Bee on TONIGHT

They're trying to spell lapies...

Here's a good article on the etymology of the word BEE

from noted etymology guru and word maven Charles Hodgson:

http://podictionary.com/?p=2101

If you have any interest in words for the sake of words, you will find podictionary.com worth a closer look. You can subscribe via RSS feed, which makes it quite easy (and keeps the entries organized and in their own neat little file--not your inbox).

Relive the excitement

Channel 8 has posted the Bee re-play: Tuesday, 31 March at 4 pm and Wednesday, 1 April at 8.30 pm. If you're like me, you'll watch it and be surprised every inch of the way, even though you already know how it turns out. I can't wait to see how Rick Tarara produced it: Channel 8 had some pretty sophisticated equipment in the Great Hall last Thursday. From what I could tell, viewers at home will be able to see the word underneath the regular camera shot (except for during that awkward moment when we ran out of hard words and had to go "off the grid"--somehow the Library's version of PowerPoint was missing from the laptop, so I couldn't type them in as we went along).

You can check the www.dsctv.com schedule for future Bee showings, and you can also order a copy of the show by calling x0737.

This is what we mean by "Bee Tree"

Here's a photo of this year's amazing Bee Tree, created by artist Jane Bleakley and populated by many generous donations from local and regional businesses. The hive shows what the prizes are, and you have to guess the word clue. In keeping with the Library's culture of value for your municipal tax dollar, the prizes were sold at less than face value. Everybody wins on the Bee Tree!

Gnorimoschema. Really.

Well, we can now identify the 12 smartest spellers in Dover. What an evening! You couldn't have made up a wilder story.

The first round went pretty much as one might expect, with the three teams (B-H Stingers, the Young and the Restless, and Prince 'n' Pals) in a dead heat for most of the round. The Young and the Restless (fabulous name: the teachers are young and their students are restless): Judy Cronin, Andrea Martin and Alisa Saunders, worked well under pressure alongside Prince 'n' Pals: Chickering Principal Kirk Downing, Deb Reinemann, and Sally Winslow, before the B-H Stingers-- made up of Bee Veterans Sue Geremia, Rebecca Kovrlija (a former champ), and Sara Muckstadt--edged them out and won the round, to the audible delight of their vast cheering section.

The second round nearly sunk me, and that's saying something. The Replacements (Jim Kinder, Sushil Kumar and their lovely companion, whose name escapes me at the moment) stepped out of the audience to sub for the no-show "Greatest Team Ever"--not having seen a word of the word list before that moment!--and held their own against Veteran Spellers the Town House Honey Bees and new-Bees Will Bleakley, Paul Fiore (the left-handed scribe) and Greg Kahoun (the BEE-List Celebrities). This round ran me out of words! I keep stats from prior Bees, and this year I had 3x the normal number of Killer Bee (aka extra hard) words. But we had to call a time-out and go "off the grid" because the BEE-list Celebrities and the Town House Honey Bees spelled every single word without flinching. I think they could have gone through the entire 900+ word list. We actually had to call an intermission while we looked for additional words! Between the people who hadn't studied but still knew words like endemic and erythrophobia, and the braniacs who COULD NOT be stumped by words like spaeman and coati, it was an episode of shock and awe for those of us sitting by the dictionary. We finally ended the round with potvaliant (made stronger or bolder by having drunk strong drink). The BEE List Celebrities deservedly won the round, but all 12 players get my personal standing ovation. I'll be waiting for you next year.... and your first word will be PHARAOH. You know why.

Round 3 saw the winners of our Perfect Attendance Award--the Coldwell Banker, Wellesley team (played this year by Betsy Breziner, Kathy Iovanni and Bee Veteran Laura Talmud)--pit their skills against the muscular vocabularies of Just the Neighbors (Joe Desalvo, Tom Dixon and Nancy Simms) and the Spellunkers (Tod Dimmick, who kindly offered me his dictionary during the previous round, Lori Krussell and Pamela Mok). It was a good long fight, ranging from relevant (a word I can never spell) to tatterdemalion, and finally ending in philippic. We all breathed a sigh of relief when the round was finished. I had developed onychophagia (fingernail-biting).

Round 4 pitted the baseball caps of the Dover Foundation (dressed to promote their upcoming musical, Damn Yankees, check their website and buy your tickets at: http://www.thedoverfoundation.org/doverfoundation/Damn_Yankees.html) against the straw boaters of the Dover Garden Club (Bats Wheeler, Carol Hollingsworth and Lynn Petrasch) and the wildly creative soap bubble headdresses of the Clean Bees, a library team sponsored by ScrubaDub (returning veterans Karen McKoy and Ellie Herd, joined by soprano librarian Roberta Anderson). The wildest hats won the round, and the Clean Bees moved into the Championship Round--once again, the team who never used their Mulligan.

Now that you are acquainted with the players, it will come as no surprise to you that the Championship Round (no Mulligans!) blew through the standard list and went right out into the Killer Killer Bee words. These players (the B-H Stingers, the BEE List Celebrities, the Spellunkers and the Clean Bees) had no trouble with olax, haruspication or weissnichtwo. I thought for sure we'd nail somebody on phthisic, but no--everyone spelled it correctly. YIKES. We went through dysrhythmia (the winning word in 2006), vicissitude (I can never spell that, either), picklehaube (the pointy helmet German soldiers wore) and diphthong before the Spellunkers won the Bee with the word gnorimoschema. It's a kind of moth--dull-looking but its larvae set galls in plants. Now you know.

We were 6 words away from the very end of the list. The remaining words were kwashiorkor, pfefferneuss, oneiromancy, tuilyie, pteroclididae and... beestings. I firmly believe that any one of those spellers could have won. It was just amazing to watch them. Look for the replays on Channel 8. These people are incredible, and chances are you know at least some of them.

EVERYONE WHO PLAYED IS A WINNER. The Bee is a huge fundraiser for the Library, and everyone who played helped contribute to the bottom line. I can't wait to find out how the Bee Tree and Bee Cafe went. Onychophagia aside, I had a blast. I hope you did, too.

Paul Keleher kindly photographed the evening for us, and has graciously given us his link to the Bee photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pkeleher/sets/72157615870573875/show/. See for yourself.

Can you spell pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis?

Just messing with you ;-D
It's not going to be used tonight.
Good luck!!

King, Bee

Bee Chair Marlayne Brace, who has her hands full keeping track of all the loose ends I generate, gently pointed out to me that the DTL Bee has more than one King. We are really fortunate to have the commentating skills of George "King" Doherty (yes, King really is his nickname!) as our Announcer and Master of Ceremonies.

George grew up in Dedham and has lived in Dover for 11 years. His stamina as our MC must come from his athletic training: he skis, runs marathons, golfs, enjoys tennis and is a triathlete. His sense of civic spirit, which is so evident in the work he does for the Friends of the Library, also finds an outlet in coaching, fundraising for Dana-Farber, and participation in the Caryl Managment Advisory Committee. George is a principal at Corcoran & Havlin Insurance Group of Wellesley and Medfield (www.chinsurance.com).

Many thanks to you, King, for dedicating your time and energy to the Library Bee. Your warmth and quick wit help the evening shine!

last-minute prep

The Bee Team met today to prepare lagniappes: we wrapped water bottles donated by Save-A-Lot in re-usable bags from Bridgewater Credit Union, tied them with a yellow ribbon, and clipped programs and name-tags to them. Contestants will pick these packages up when they enter the Great Hall on Thursday evening. We also prepped some hilarious gifties for the "superlatives" winners: we'll give out prizes for Best Name, Best Dressed and Best Team Spirit, plus a special award for one of our long-standing supporters. Our appreciation for these winners knows no bounds, and neither does our sense of the absurd...BEE warned!

We have some last-minute prep to do to acknowledge donors, and then there's setup and food and tech on Thursday afternoon.

Bring your thinking caps, your wallets, and your sense of humor. It's going to be a really good night.

Something to write home about

I stopped in at Taylor's Stationery in Needham today; they have Bee stationery, which I buy myself to use for the "unofficial" thank you notes that I often want to write after the Bee.

Not only did I get a special on Crane's Bee stationery: buy one, get one 50% off--Taylor's also very generously donated a $25 gift card to the Bee Tree!

The Crane's special applies to most of Taylor's stationery stock, and I don't know how long it will be in place. But if I were you, I'd buy the gift card off the Tree on Thursday night, and head on over! Write on!

Boston Spelling Bee: a winning scenario

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1119284117?bctid=16639520001

Congratulations to Brighton 5th grader J. Rexon Apurado, who won the second Boston city-wide Spelling Bee. Check the link above to see the final moments--the winning word was scenario--and wish this talented young man well as he moves on to the national Bee in May.

as noted in today's Boston Globe; clip from boston.com/globe