Motus Mentis

Well, the 2008 Wellfleet Oysterfest Spelling Bee is in the books, and I did not win. I did come in second, but my hope of building on last year’s triumph to establish the foundations of a dynasty is dashed. I was beaten by a fine speller named Maria something, from Jamaica Plain, which is apparently a neighborhood somewhere in Boston.

I had the thing in my hand in the late innings, when it was down to just the two of us. Maria stumbled on some word — I can’t recall what it was — and all I had to do to walk away with the glittering prize (immortal fame, pirate’s treasure, access to local females, etc.) was to spell the word “periostracum” (meaning the outer layer of the shell of a mollusk). I had never heard of the word, but if I had spent a little more time to think about my answer I should have got it. I was well aware of the primitive fishes known as Ostracoderms — the name coming from the Greek ostrakon, meaning tile or pottery shard. (These jawless animals, which went extinct at the end of the Devonian period, were covered with bony plates.) But in the heat of battle I was unable to parse out this derivation, and offered up “p-e-r-i-o-s-t-r-i-c-u-m” as my guess.

Under the rules of the Bee, this blunder meant that Maria and I would have another round. Her word — another that neither of us knew — was “veliger” (the free-swimming larvae of various forms of molluscs). She got it right, and now I had to spell my word right to stay alive. I was given “pycnogonid” (the name of a group of marine arthropods usually known as sea spiders), and my blood ran cold, as I had never heard the word before, and there were clearly several ways it could go. I guessed “p-y-c-n-o-g-y-n-i-d”, and it was all over. Second place.

Oh well. Next year.