Wordcraft Community Home Page
2009 Scripps Spelling Bee

This topic can be found at:
https://wordcraft.infopop.cc/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/756604565/m/455103491

June 04, 2009, 08:32
wordcrafter
2009 Scripps Spelling Bee
Every year at about this time, the Scripps Spelling Bee presents oddball or obscure words we'd otherwise never see. Here are some from the Bee recently completed. Today's word is the one that stumped the youngest of the semi-finalists, who is only 9 years old.

fodientadj.: (of animals) digging or burrowing
[Latin fodere to dig]
June 05, 2009, 07:39
wordcrafter
One of yesterday's "burrowing" quotes described a mole.

I digress to present two interesting antique names for this creature, each very aptly noting its burrowing nature. At their starts, one name was akin to wander, and meant "turning"; the other was akin to mold, for "earth, dirt". Each had the ending warpe, meaning "to toss or throw" (akin to our warp). Thus the names for this critter literally meant "turn-tosser" or "earth-tosser".

wandewoerpe – Old English for "mole" (later shortened to wante or want)
mouldwarp – a mole

Each has many variant spellings.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: wordcrafter,
June 06, 2009, 09:04
wordcrafter
tourelle – a turret
June 07, 2009, 08:57
wordcrafter
I tend to avoid presenting food-words, because the sample quotes for them are rarely useful. For example, "He ate a meal of ________," tells you nothing about the food in question. The blank could just as easily read "roast beef" or "whitefish" or "termites". But in this case I can offer you a quote that gives you a concrete image of our particular food, tagliatelle.

tagliatelle – pasta in narrow ribbons [from Italian tagliare to cut]
[Does tagliatelle differ from fettuccine, whose name comes from fettucia ribbon?]
June 07, 2009, 19:15
wordcrafter
guayabera – a light open-necked men's shirt, of Cuba and Mexico: usually with large pockets and pleats down the front, and worn outside the pants

The style is familiar, even if the name is not. Politicians can use this shirt to "connect" with Cubans:Similarly, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez has made something of a trademark of a red guayabera linking himself with Castro's communist (Red) Cuba.
June 07, 2009, 19:34
Robert Arvanitis
Our colleagues in the Philippines might claim precedent with the barong...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barong_Tagalog


RJA