New York magazine has perhaps an unintentionally meaningful article on the latest “Scripps National Spelling Bee”, during which co-winners Vanya Shivashankar and Gokul Venkatachalam “tackled obscure and impossible words like myrmotherine, pyrrhuloxia, hippocrepiform, and sprachgefühl.” Is it rude to point out that 1) only two of these words can even remotely be considered English, 2) that none of them have anything to do with common usage, and 3) that, thanks to computers and the Internet, being a good speller isn’t nearly as important as it used to be?
Seriously, why waste your time memorizing the spelling of words like myrmotherine, pyrrhuloxia, hippocrepiform, and sprachgefühl when you could be studying calculus, or programming, or statistics, or information theory, or genetics, or economics, or Chinese? If you want to impress people with your memory, recite the prologue to The Canterbury Tales (this will work) or—who else?—Shakespeare.1 Ninety-five percent of the words you want to spell, Word can spell for you, and you can look up the other five percent on the Internet. In the old, old days, mathematicians with good memories would memorize the addition and multiplication tables not from 1 to 10 but from 1 to100, and memorize the square roots of dozens of prime numbers.2 Well, they don’t do that any more.
Indian kids (a lot of them, anyway) are smart and do study all the topics I’ve mentioned. But, really, kids, take a break from “mere” spelling.
Afterwords
As a child I was always a terrible speller, because I hated anything that didn’t “speak” to me. I was forced to become a decent speller when I got a job as a journalist in the pre-computer days. I’m pretty good now, but still come up with some howlers. Also, computers won’t save you if you aren’t reasonably well read, because English has so many words that sound alike but are spelled differently. But surely in a decade or so Word will be able to figure out if you “meant” “two”, “to”, or “too”.
What about the words? Well, “sprachgefühl” is simply a German import, meaning “having an intuitive sense for a language”—kind of a nice word, but, as I say, it’s not English, and I’ve never seen it, and I read a lot. The other three—all scientific terms—are “interesting” if you like etymology, as I do, despite the fact that I’m almost entirely ignorant of languages other than English. Etymology is something the web does better (for me, at least) than books ever did.
“Myrmotherine” means “ant hunting”. Ant-eaters are myrmotherine mammals. There are a lot of ants in the world, so it can pay to go out of your way to learn how to catch and eat them.3 The Myrmidons, a legendary people in Greek history, supposedly sprang from ants (the Greek word for ant nest was “murmedon”). Which came first, the ants or the folks? Dunno, but “myrm-” is often a sign that we’re talking about ants. The “ther” part means “hunt”, coming ultimately from the Greek word for “wild beast”.
“Pyrrhuloxia” is the scientific name for a species of bird, a grosbeak. “Purrhoula” is Greek for “flame-colored bird”, coming from “pur” (or “pyr”) “fire.”
“Hippocrepiform” means “shaped like a horseshoe,” from the Greek “hippo” for “horse” and “krēpis,” Greek for “boot.”
I consider “myrmotherine” and “hippocrepiform” “sort of English” because their endings are English, even though I suspect that only a biologist would use either.
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Or maybe the Mahābhārata. ↩︎
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The square root of any number can be derived from the square roots of the primes that compose it. For example, the square root of 6 can be obtained by multiplying the square roots of 2 and 3. Of course, these days, this useful trick is entirely passé. If you want the square root of 455, you don’t multiply the square roots of 5, 7, and 13. You punch 455 into your calculator and you’re done. ↩︎
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It can also pay to get along with ants, in which case you’re myrmecophilous. ↩︎
