05.31.08

Easy as A-Bee-C

Posted in Chaucer, Middle English, Shakespeare, spelling at 7:00 am by Bill Brohaugh

Lafayette Indiana’s Sameer Mishra, just 13 years old, won the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee in D.C. on Friday, May 30, by spelling guerdon. Which is mostly the correct spelling. The word–meaning “reward, compensation,” primarily in a poetic sense these days–for most of its lifetime has used guerdon as the accepted spelling. Chaucer used it thusly; Shakespeare, as well.

Here’s Chaucer from “The Sompnour’s Tale”:

We have this worlde’s lust all in despight
Lazar and Dives lived diversely,
And diverse guerdon hadde they thereby.

Note: lust means “pleasure” here, and despight–despite its spelling, young Mr. Mishra–means “contempt,” and isn’t it a cool word? (A sompnour, by the further way, is a summoner.)

Of course, guerdon isn’t the only “official” spelling, as official as spelling can be over the history of English. Other recorded forms, my trusty OED.com tells me, include (in alphabetical order) gardon, gardoun, gardwyne, gerdon, gerdonne, gerdoun, geurdone, guardon, guardone, guerdoun, gwerddoun, gwerdon, gwerdone, not to mention the comely Scottish variation, gwairdoun.

I think the time has come for Xtreme Spelling Bee. To win, you must orthograph not only the current spelling, but also every variant spelling over the history of the language.

Well, never mind. The contest is already Xtreme. Here are the other words Mishra spelled correctly on the orthopath to winning: demitasse, quadrat, diener, hyssop, macédoine, basenji, numnah, chorion, nacarat, sinicize, hyphaeresis, taleggio, esclandre.

And what was Sameer Mishra’s guerdon guerdon? $35,000 in cash, a $2,500 U.S. savings bond, and reference books galore, perhaps three of which actually containing the word guerdon.

Shameless Plug Alert: For some personal thoughts on spelling bees and why I suck at them, read this sample from my recently published book, in odd coincidence titled Everything You Know About English Is Wrong. End Shameless Plug Alert.

2 Comments »

  1. John said,

    May 31, 2008 at 12:07 pm

    What would have happened if Mr. Mishra had spelt that word one of the many other ways you listed? Do the Bee people have all alternate spellings available?
    I like the Xtreme spelling idea.

  2. Bill Brohaugh said,

    May 31, 2008 at 1:38 pm

    Depends on which variant–some would be allowed under section 3 of the rules:

    3. Official dictionary and source of words: Webster’s Third New International Dictionary and its addenda section, copyright 2002, Merriam-Webster, (Webster’s Third) is the final authority for the spelling of words. All words given in competition are entries in Webster’s Third. If more than one spelling is listed for a word that the pronouncer has provided for the speller to spell, any of these spellings will be accepted as correct if all of the following three criteria are met: (1) The pronunciations of the words are identical, (2) the definitions of the words are identical, and (3) the words are clearly identified as being standard variants of each other. Spellings at other locations having temporal labels (such as archaic, obsolete), stylistic labels (such as substand, nonstand), or regional labels (such as North, Midland, Irish) which differ from main entry spellings not having these status labels will not be accepted as correct.

    I wish I had known that before I spent eight years writing my Bill’s Big Book of Alternate Spellings for Spelling Bees tome. In it, I list every word in the Oxford English Dictionary and offer two variant spellings: the real one, and mxyzptlk, which the speller can fall back on in a pinch. Scripps rejected it for some reason.

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