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NewsvineLast Thursday night, Stanford hosted a fast-paced, grueling competition — a new kind of sport. There would be only one left standing at its end, and philosophy major Chris Simpson ‘08 was determined to be that man.
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The audience waited with bated breath for his next task.
“A flat-topped flower cluster in which the individual flower stalks arise from the same point,” read the moderator.
The look on Simpson’s face said it all: He was a goner, a goner in Stanford’s first-ever “define-a-thon.” He chose a word at random.
“I’m sorry,” the moderator said, “That is incorrect. The correct response was an umbel.”
In a define-a-thon, each contestant is read a definition, followed by a set of answers to choose from. Unlike in a spelling bee, contestants do not simply have to spell the word; they must understand what it means.
The event, hosted in a corner of the Stanford Bookstore, attracted only a handful of competitors and even fewer spectators. Admittedly, I didn’t expect all of Stanford to share my passion for words and the event was publicized only by a small sign outside the bookstore — but still. Harvard managed to fill an auditorium with over 200 people, according to a Apr. 30 article in The New York Times.
As a fuzzy, I take pride in my love of language, but as I sat watching the define-a-thon, I felt ashamed. Ashamed of Stanford, for not caring enough about anything other than the sciences. Ashamed of Stanford’s two contestants, neither of whom went beyond a round that included such stumpers as “gazebo” and “demagogue.” But mostly, I was just ashamed of the people at American Heritage — word lovers I thought were like me — who thought up the whole idea.
Because a word is not just a string of random symbols, nor is it a simple sign. Words are living, breathing creatures with history and personality. Knowing a word’s definition is like knowing your best friend through her Facebook profile: It’s a shallow, superficial appreciation of a complex and beautiful thing. The competition is an impressive feat of rote memorization, but like a spelling bee, it entirely misses the beauty of language.
Consider a word that arose in Harvard’s define-a-thon. Tintinnabulation, meaning the ringing of bells, derives from the onomatopoeic Latin verb tintinnare, which means to clink or jingle. The obscure word gained some prominence only after it appeared in a line of poetry by Edgar Allen Poe:
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells...
Or take my favorite word of all time, “floccinaucinihilipilification,” which was created when a high school student strung together four Latin words, each meaning “nothing.” And not just the esoteric is fascinating; even the most common, everyday words can be special. “Inspire” literally means “to breathe in,” as though the muses themselves were breathing ideas into us.
Regardless of your major — fuzzy or techie — take a moment to think about the impact of language on your life. The best teachers are the ones who communicate the concepts; the best lecturers are the ones who move us with their words. Language is a reflection of human intelligence, a product of evolution, just like the jacaranda trees blooming in the Quad, or the winged butterflies that flutter past. It cannot be reduced to a competition of fact-recitation — and it never should.