Sjambock, feuilleton, cymotrichous…
Do these words look familiar to you? No? Same.
You see, that's me and my teammates, before our synapses stopped transmitting information from one neuron to the other, before the spelling bee stung us in our butts. We were all smiles before we got hit with words we didn't even know existed! (We were still all smiles after ending but y'know, we live for the drama).
Being someone whos vocabulary is limited to what she sees in textbooks and the fanfiction she reads on the daily, spelling quizzes always had me choking for oxygen, so naturally, in this particular event, I only contributed what I could muster with such a small arsenal of vocabulary. But hey, we managed to get 6th place! Not too bad for first timers?
The competition started out with the word expatiate, meaning: to wander. I didn't know the word so I suggested "expetiate" but we ultimately ended up writing "expeciate". WRONG! There were so many words we got wrong but we laughed it off because honestly, it was such an enjoyable experience, I had to cheer for the leading team because they were doing awfully well.
There were "twists" to the game: giving the origin of the word, giving the definition of the word, and lastly giving a synonym to the word. As if spelling these words wasn’t smile-erasing enough for ya!
The words that stuck to me are the ones you read in the first sentence of this post. Sjambock is a word of African origin, a quick Google search tells you it's a kind of heavy leather whip made out of hippo or rhino hide (aww, poor endangered babies). Here I thought all words in a spelling bee would be of Latin, French, or Greek origin! Goes to show that we should know more about different cultures!
Feuilleton obviously French, is defined by our every trusted Merriam-Webster dictionary as a part of a European newspaper or magazine devoted to material designed to entertain the general reader. My dear readers, y'all need to hear how this word is pronounced (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/feuilleton), I could not spell that, even after hearing it for the nth time.
Cymotrichous is an adjective used to describe having the hair wavy. I would just describe someone having wavy hair as well, "someone with wavy hair"! I can't picture myself or hear myself saying "
Look at me being stressed (haha!). Phenolphthalein is a word for a crystalline compound used in chemical analysis as an indicator. And we, as students who more or less was subject to being bullied by chemistry, had to get this one word right (and we did).
What I got from this whole experience is that spelling is heck-a difficult and that words are fun and they're a very human thing. As I wrote this down I realized that we're the only species in this planet who understand each other by vomiting words at each other and that our difference in cultures has made language an entangled web of letters and it's all a beautiful mess. This is my Weltanschauung
Go get a dictionary for me for that last word, will ya? Did I use it correctly?
XoXo,
Lilacbeams