Scrabbling for Words

Okay--I confess.

Although I am both an English professor and a self-proclaimed verbivore, have been nickname "Verbinator" and "Walking Dictionary," and am a reigning Boggle champ among friends and family, I have discovered that what I once thought of as my "fairly extensive" vocabulary is truly substandard. I am now in my fifth round of e-mail Scrabble (3rd round with two aunts and a cousin, soon to begin a 3rd round with a friend and colleague) courtesy of Scrabulous.com, and I have been soundly defeated each time--and in some cases, embarrassingly so!

Granted, strategy has something to do with it, and trying to make words with only 7 letters fit into little pink, red, light blue, and dark blue squares, making sure that the highest-point letters (q and z, each worth 10 points, I think) hit the best colors while at the same time working around the words that are already on the board is more than I can handle at times. Strategy games (for example, chess) have never been good for me, because I am not a visual person. But working with words, well, I thought that would be a breeze!

And, granted, the other players always seem to get the high-point letters while I get stuck with all vowels. Or all consonants.

But what really gets me are the little two- and three-letter words that are being used against me, like QI (31 points), ZA (26 points), PI (18 points), OX (27 points), GAE (8 points), and KOR (14 points--okay, that one was mine). I mean, what the heck is ZA, for heaven's sake? Who knew that a Q word existed without the ubiquitous tag-along u? Two-letter words are outlawed in Boggle, but apparently they are perfectly acceptable in Scrabble. I just can't get my mind around it.

So, enough whining you say. Get over it. Okay, I'm working on that, and I figure if I play 100 more games or so, I might actually be able to whip out a ubiquitous on somebody given the right cadre of tiles. I thought I'd spend a few moments providing you with definitions for some of the more annoying two- and three-letter words I've been up against, thanks to Dictionary.com:

Za
Apparently za (a noun) has a couple of meanings: slang for pizza, and either the 11th or 17th letter of the Arabic alphabet. I'm not sure how it can be both the 11th and/or the 17th letter; it seems to me it has to be one or the other. I think Dictionary.com may be flawed, or the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 2006, that Dictionary.com claims to have pulled the definition from.

Qi
A variation of chi, qi is the inherent energy or life force of all things.

Gae
A variation of gay, meaning "blithe" or "cheerful."

Kor
A kor is equal to a homer, which is an ancient unit of measurement equal to about 10 bushels.

Whew. That exercise has drained the qi right out of me. I think I'll order a kor of za to restore my gae nature.

Pet Peeve: An Everyday Rant, Every Day

English instructors are usually blessed with a love of language, which can also be a curse. If I had $1 for every time I have been told, "Wow, you're an English professor? I guess I better watch what I say around you!" I could retire now (but I wouldn't, because I love what I do). My response is to smile and say something along the lines of "Well, I'm off the clock now, so I promise not to correct your grammar unless you ask me to or pay me to." That statement usually puts people a little more at ease--but not fully. For those of you who feel the same way around English faculty, let me reassure you: we are not listening to what you say to tick off grammatical mistakes; rather, we are paying attention to what you are actually saying. Because English students often struggle with writing, English instructors become very good at deciphering what people really mean, whether they are able to clearly articulate their meaning or not.

That being said, when it comes to writing, it's a completely different story. I find that signs and printed materials with misspellings or inappropriate apostrophes get my dander up. For example, please note that if you have your family's name engraved on a rock for your garden or emblazoned on a varnished piece of wood for your house, please do NOT add an apostrophe! In other words, if your last name is Smith, then your sign should read "The Smiths," not "The Smith's."

Occasionally in my blog, I'll point out one of my professorial pet peeves. In this blog, I'm dealing with the difference between everyday and every day. Nearly every day, for instance, I find my students writing everyday when they really mean every day. What's the difference? It's quite simple, really: when you mean an individual day, as in each and every day, use every day. When you use an adjective to describe a common, ordinary object that is used every day, you use everyday. Clear as mud, right? Here are some examples:

• I would eventually like to be disciplined enough to write a blog posting every day.
  
• Every day during the summer, I enjoy playing in the dirt. (I love to garden.)
• My everyday clothing is very casual.
• It is an everyday thing for me to feel tired.

Do you have a grammatical pet peeve that irritates you? Share, please!

Quizzes Are No Joking Matter...Or Are They?

Students hate quizzes; as an instructor who frequently gives quizzes to test students' knowledge of a subject, determine whether they're reading the material, or just focus them on important information, I've come to accept that fact. But how often do students think about where the word quiz came from in the first place? A study of the word reveals two different ideas--a quiz as either entertainment or interrogation.

The origin of the word appears to be unknown or obscure. However, the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins provides an anecdotal discussion of the word's origin:

"It seems that late in the eighteenth century one James Daly, the manager of a theater in Dublin . . . made a very rash wager. He bet that he could introduce a word into the language overnight. . . . He hired all the urchins in Dublintown, equipped them with pieces of chalk, and sent them out into the night with instructions to chalk a single word on every wall and billboard in the city. The word was quiz. And, as a result of Daly's enterprise, it was on the lips of all Dublin in the morning."

What makes this anecdote plausible is that it coincides with one of the earliest meanings of quiz--that of a practical joke. However, since there is no written evidence at the time this event supposedly occurred, it is unlikely that it is anything more than a tall tale told over a pint of ale.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) traces the first use of quiz to 1782: "He's a droll quiz, and I rather like him." At that time, the word mean an "eccentric person," (but by 1798, the term had expanded its meaning to include "an odd-looking thing," as in "[w]here did you get that quiz of a hat?" (OED). Both meanings are considered obsolete today.

The OED then notes a reference in 1833 to an obscure meaning of quiz--a toy, called a bandalore in French and a quiz in English. The toy may have been odd-looking--hence the name quiz, but this idea is purely conjecture. This is, however, the first time we get a sense of quiz as a game or form of entertainment. The word later comes to mean "a practical joke; a hoax, a piece of humbug, banter or ridicule; a jest or witticism" (OED). In the United States, a quiz becomes "an act of quizzing or questioning; specifically an oral exam of a student or class by a teacher. . . . A set of questions to be answered as entertainment (my emphasis)" (OED). The latter definition reminds us more of the entertaining quizzes in poular magazines that ask readers to rate their "love quotient" or some such nonsense than it reminds us of the more traditional quizzes given to assess a students' knowledge of a subject.

So where does quiz as a kind of knowledge test come into play? John Ayto's Dictionary of Word Origins suggests that the verb quiz "later came to be used for 'look at mockingly or questioningly through a monocle,' and it may be that this led on (perhaps helped by associations with inquisitive or Latin quis? 'who?, what?') to the sense 'interrogate.'" The American Heritage Dictionary reinforces this theory, indicating that quiz might be associated with question, inquisitive, or the English dialect verb quiset, "to question." However, when we think of an interrogation, we think of a formal questioning, like police questioning a suspect, or a cruel questioning, like a war enemy extracting information through torture. (Much like my crotchety-but-beloved high school government teacher, Mr. Agosta, who called our class Q&A sessions interrogation. If we replied "I don't know" in answer to one of his inquiries, we were reprimanded for not reading or studying the materials. If we replied "I forgot," his response was always "Senility is not indigenous to youth.") What's ironic here is that the questioning--the quiz--started off in fun, if we go back to the earlier definitions of quiz. And students, of course, do not seem to see quizzes as fun!

So it is through the idea of questioning in fun that we get to quiz as an examination, the definition we are most familiar with today. Of course, using today's connotation of an impromptu test, many students might agree that, hearkening back to one of the original meanings of the word, today's quizzes are indeed practical jokes, or rather are no joking matter!

Are You Phobophobic?

I stumbled across the word phobophobia today--fear of phobias. The first phobia I remember learning about was hydrophobia--fear of water, as well as a term used for rabies (since rabies creates a fear of water in the human or animal who has the condition)--thanks to reading Old Yeller. Nobody can accuse me of having triskaidekaphobia (an irrational fear of the number 13), since my birthday occasionally falls on Friday the 13th. So I joyfully consider 13 my lucky number.

Thinking about phobias (meaning "irrational fears") led me to wonder about other kinds of phobias people might have, so I searched for "phobias" and came up with this site: The Phobia List . Here are a few of my favorite phobias from this site:

• Alliumphobia - Fear of garlic. (I guess this phobia is genetic for vampires.)
• Amathophobia - Fear of dust. (I can honestly say this is a phobia I do NOT have--as anyone who has seen the dust bunnies in my house can attest to.)
• Genuphobia - Fear of knees. (What?)
• Papyrophobia - Fear of paper. (I can understand this one. I once got a papercut on my eyeball--don't ask.)
• Thaasophobia - Fear of sitting. (I can't imagine going through life only standing or reclining.)
• Vestiphobia - Fear of clothing. (My cat exhibits signs of this phobia. She absolutely refuses to be dressed up. I have shown her pictures of the three little kittens who lost their mittens and cried as a result, but she remains unconvinced that clothing is necessary for felines.)
• Xenoglossophobia - Fear of foreign languages.
• Zemmiphobia - Fear of the great mole rat. (Sounds like the premise for a bad sci-fi flick.)

If you enjoyed The Phobia List, try The Phobias or About.com's Phobias List. If you are looking for more serious sites, visit Mayo Clinic's Phobias fact sheet or the American Psychiatric Association's Phobias site.

If I suffer from any phobia, it's agoraphobia--fear of being in crowded, public places like markets. I don't have a problem in most crowds, but if the crowds get really close, I feel like I need to scream. So...what's your phobia?