Silent R, Part II

As you may have read, while I have been retired eight months, I’m adding to my workload and still not sorting boxes nor making social arrangements with the growing list of people I was sure I would see more frequently now that I’m not at Pat’s Screen Printing. But I did finally get to several events in one week that I’ve not been able to attend in the past due to it being the height of screen-printing season.

The one event I’ve wanted to make it to for years that I still didn’t get to was the Colorado Brass Band concert at Western Not State. Musicians come from all over the United States for a week of rehearsals that culminates in an excellent concert.

This was the brainchild of the late John Kincaid, doyen of Western’s music department for decades. Many of the musicians, although this is an aging population, were students of his who return annually to pay tribute to his teaching. The concert used to be held in the Quigley Bandshell, with the audience seated on the grass of the loveliest quad on campus, although one year some heroic audience member had to leap on a sprinkler head to keep everyone from getting soaked when groundskeeping forgot to turn off the watering timer.

I don’t know if it’s still held in the bandshell, since I haven’t been able to attend in years, and I kind of hope this year’s wasn’t because we got an extremely welcome afternoon downpour a couple hours before the concert, and I still don’t know because I still didn’t get to go.

All week I’d been attending events that had in years past attracted my attention but my work schedule didn’t provide for, and this band concert would have been at the top of my list except that I’d signed up (to be perfectly technical, been signed up by my friend — I think that’s the word I want — Nancy Gauss) for the library’s adult spelling bee, now in its second year.

I had great trepidation — t-r-e-p-i-d-a-t-i-o-n — about this event, even though it had intrigued me when I read about its happenstance last year, and I almost ditched it to go to the band concert, but I had signed up/been signed up, so I felt I should honor my commitment.

As with all my other events of the week, there was free food, but surprisingly I didn’t run into too many people I hadn’t seen in awhile. In fact, outside of the Gauss (our collective term for Nancy and husband Pete) and Lynn, I only knew the judges. Not a single one of my fellow competitors was known to me, although one looked like I probably should have recognized her from somewhere. But she didn’t say, “Yes we know each other from _________” so maybe not.

The library staff (of which Nancy is a member, because like me, her “retirement” involves work) had my name on a laminated piece of paper, and I had to roll a die that had more than 93 sides (because that’s the number I rolled) to determine the contestants’ order. I ended up as Contestant #11 in a field of 12, and still convinced I was going to embarrass — which is a word I always have trouble spelling — myself, I took my seat.

But we started off with easy words, and everyone made it through the first two rounds with “moxie” and other words I can no longer remember. My first word was “dandelion,” which was one syllable longer than anyone else’s first word. Not that I’m complaining, since I knew how to spell it.

For the third round we moved to the “moderately difficult” words, and while I didn’t find the first three words difficult, it knocked contestants one through three out of their chairs with “alacrity” and a couple other words.

I think my first “moderately difficult” word was “visage,” which our city’s mayor, whose first language is Spanish, pronounced as “vi-sahge” but I’ve always said “vis-edge.” Either way, I spelled it correctly. One of my fears going into the bee was that I would botch a word I can read but not pronounce. Like “indict”: why is that not spelled “indight”?

I also worried I would rush to spell something without remembering it had a homonym, like “incite” rather than “insight.” But other than hearing someone else’s word as “Appalachian” rather than “appellation” and thinking after someone correctly spelled “crater” that it could have been a Grecian “krater,” the issue didn’t come up, and clearly was all in my head anyway.

I also didn’t need “eleemosynary,” which I was sure I would, and I reviewed “occasion” with one S and “occurrence” with two R’s needlessly, and it didn’t come up but I was prepared for “crepuscular,” a word Nancy added to our lexicon several years ago.

What I wasn’t ready for was “candelabrum,” so while I had been “fastidious” in my preparation (or not), I didn’t stop to sound that one out. I think I spelled it c-a-n-d-l-e-b-r-u-m, which is stupid because it sounds just like it’s spelled: can-de-la-brum. (This also turns out to be the singular; “candelabra” is the plural. See where mistakes get us?)

Sadly, this put me in fourth place, one short of a cash prize. No one ever wants to be fourth, just off the podium, although since I’d gone in convinced I was going to blow it in the first round, I was okay with my performance. But it was still a dumb word to go out on.

Not, however, as dumb as the word the defending champion got tripped up on. John, which is as much of his name as I know, was breezing through all his words, as he did with b-a-r-b-i-t-u-a-t-e. Barbituate, right? Wrong. Every single person in the library got it wRong, because it turns out there’s a second R in there: barbiturate. A silent R, just like we all learn about in grade school.

We all questioned it, and demanded the judges look it up in the Merriam-Webster dictionary sitting on their table, but no: definitely an R. That’s what my internet said when I got home, too, and what WordPress is telling me now. An R.

So we all learned something, and John had to go out in third, leaving Suzanne and Philip to duke it out over the winning word: vicissitude, which Suzanne got wrong (an extra C) and Philip, who had correctly spelled “uxorious” without ever having heard it before (I had, and would have spelled it correctly, as I would vicissitude, stupid candelabrum), and I would have managed “pulchritude” and probably even “synecdoche,” which they each passed on (you could bypass one word, according to the rules), although in my haste to show I could spell synecdoche I might have put a Y on the end rather than the E I know belongs there.

I commiserated with John after the bee, and felt quite complimented when he told me he’d been sure I was going to be one of the finalists, and one of the judges told me I was a good speller, and since I didn’t embarrass myself too badly (although I feel I let Liberace down), I am likely to sign up again next year and hope it doesn’t happen on the same night as the brass band concert.

And I can do that, because I’m retired, even if I’m not seeing the R in there just yet.