Round One Eliminations
This Week: Spelling Bee Round One Eliminators-adscititious, oppugn, temalacatl
The world of competitive spelling seems like a gentle place humming with spirited competition— mostly cute but also a little dangerous, like a bear cub summit. So, all of these baby bears who are really, really great at spelling (and probably lots of other things!) are stuck under hot lights and put on ESPN to spell till they can simply spell no longer. I won’t even touch the last few rounds, replete with words I have never seen once in my natural born life. Dev Shah spelling the bee-winning “psammophile” (which I spelled from memory, thank you very much) was actually awe-inspiring and impressive. I was born after Vatican II and had zero room for high school Latin or Greek electives, so watching these smarties offer roots when spelling a word blows my mind. The willpower! The curiosity! The commitment to knowledge!
I root for each and every one of these sweeties because as a middle schooler, you need all the positive vibes you can get. As a teacher, I never really cared about spelling which drove my coworkers nuts! Spelling isn’t as important as communication! It’s my party platform: spelling isn’t as important as communication and tuck your shirt into your underwear so it stays put! It’s my version of a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.
The Spelling Bee should keep you humble. The word list from the first round had me sweating and wondering if I misspent my master’s degree. Some Vocabulary School terms popped up in the first round! A derivative of proprioception and nictitate took down first round spellers and my hubris wouldn’t allow me to hunt for more.
This Week’s Vocabulary List
This week I’m going to be a little different and I’m going to mine the Scripps National Spelling Bee from last weekend. At 38, I know I would have been knocked out in the first round! I picked my favorites from the first round that weren’t dogs, plants, cakes, or math concepts out of my vocabulary schema. Isn’t it wild that this list is populated by proper nouns and abstract concepts and children are expected to recognize them? Like, there are adults who can’t wait in line at the supermarket without it becoming an international incident but a 10 year old from Wyoming has to have a collegiate understanding of 12th Century Old Dutch and it’s conjugation conventions.
I organized this list in alphabetical order which, coincidentally, was the order of most to least likely to be useful in common usage.
Adscititious: (adjective) forming an addition or supplement; not integral or intrinsic
I’d be most likely to use this one more because as an inveterate researcher, I’m always finding supplements and additions that are not important to the task at hand!
Oppugn: (verb) to fight against
The root -pugn means “to fight” like pugilist, pugnacious, and repugnant.
Temalacatl: (noun) a spindle-shaped stone in Aztec sacrificial rites to which an inadequately armed captive was attached while allowed ostensibly to defend himself against his executioners
This is a new one to me! A little dark for the spelling bee, in my estimation!
I think this could be useful to make an allegory for frustration or shame like an albatross or a millstone.
Practical Applications
I never spelled on a national level because I was a deeply unserious boy-crazy middle schooler. As a 7th grade school spelling bee representative, I misspelled “restaurant.” I think I may have added an extra U but thankfully, all I remember is getting it wrong and marching my little meatball self down to the auditorium seats reserved for dipshits who can’t spell “restaurant.”
Sometimes I can’t help but feel that this mistake cursed me to work in restaurants until my mid-thirties. It wasn’t really a curse but a decorative albatross to hang around my neck. This week, Dirt published a longform piece about restaurant work and a writer’s life that ripped my brain open. The writer, Becca Schuh, elucidated several of the finer points of working in the service industry while trying to find success as a writer including shame, privacy, disillusionment, and ambition. As a long time server, all of my knowledge and personal experience outside the restaurant was adscititious to the task of serving—I existed only to serve. My former students understood my personhood better than any guest I’d ever waited on in any restaurant job. I’d regularly be oppugned by a suburban wine mom for being “just a waitress.” I’d have to eat shit, chained to a temalacatl, improperly armed to fight back because of yes-pitality, a toxic positivity way to say “the customer is always right.” Some nights I’d make my money and go home. Other nights, I’d cry on the ride home and be too overstimulated to do anything but wordlessly eat dinner after midnight with gulps of boxed red wine until I fell asleep. While reading this, I had the heart-in-in-my-butt feeling of forgetting something for someone who determines if I make enough money to live the whole time. I want to read more things like this and I want more restaurant journalism to come from restaurant workers and not just by cultural emissaries employed by august institutions. These are our stories, not theirs.
Love,
Andrea
Thanks for stopping by Vocabulary School! If you are enjoying this newsletter, make sure you’re tipping at least 25% every time you go out. Yes, even on takeout. Yes, even on drip coffee. Don’t embarrass me out there.
I still can't spell restaurant!