Aggrade.
There's a word we're all familiar with, I'm sure... No? Me neither.
It means to build up or raise the level of a land surface by depositing sediment, and I mention it because it was the word that knocked my 11-year-old grandson out of the Canadian national spelling bee junior finals last night. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, we were able to watch this event live as it went out, and Ethan (for it is he) sailed into the final five, tackling words such as 'dystopian' and 'spelunking', before 'aggrade' came up and shattered his young dreams – well, actually he wasn't too bothered, and was pleased enough with his performance. But 'aggrade'... really. It was the only word in the competition I didn't know, though I might have had some difficulty as a result of the question master's wayward pronunciation (worst example, 'plaited' pronounced 'plated') and bizarre habit of announcing 'there are two different pronunciations for this word', then saying it exactly the same way twice.
I had never seen a spelling bee before – we don't have them over here (perhaps because so few people can spell) – and I was struck by how joylessly the contest was conducted, though my daughter assures me there was plenty of joy in the room (as well as a few tears). I guess you had to be there.
The picture below is Norman Rockwell's 'Cousin Reginald Spells Peloponnesus' – a word that happily didn't come up last night (and cousin Reginald could hardly be less like our Ethan).
There's a tale of an American on his death bed who is asked whether he has any unfulfilled ambitions. "Sure" said he "I'd like to learn to spell Massachusetts."
ReplyDeleteCongratulations to Ethan. I had never run across the word "aggrade", though as the son of a geologist and an occasional summer employee of a highway department (even if on landscape crews) I might have had more chances than most to encounter it.
ReplyDeleteNow and then I see an account of the US national spelling bee. Often the winning word is not English, is German or perhaps Hindi. (I may be wrong about the latter.) Now, English is notoriously easy about taking in loan words, but some of these can hardly have appeared in American print outside learned journals. "Aggrade" is less aggressively odd.
A 19th-Century novel, The Hoosier Schoolmaster has a scene set at a spelling-bee in rural Indiana, where
""""There is one branch diligently taught in a backwoods school. The public mind seems impressed with the difficulties of English orthography, and there is a solemn conviction that the chief end of man is to learn to spell. "'Know Webster's Elementary' came down from Heaven," would be the backwoods version of the 'Greek saying but that, unfortunately for the Greeks, their fame has not reached so far.
"""
You can find the book at the Gutenberg project
Thanks George. I noticed quite a few foreign words in the Canadian contest too – as if English didn't pose enough challenges! And yes, the emphasis on spelling does seem strange – there have been plenty of good writers who couldn't, or couldn't be bothered to, spell correctly. Standard spelling took a long while to settle down, and is still evolving (especially when the 'correct' spelling is absurd, e.g. Buddleja). Ultimately spelling only matters where it can be used to prevent ambiguity and clarify meaning.
Delete