When it comes to words, an average English speaker is believed to use way less than five percent of what exists in the dictionaries. The second edition of the 20-volume Oxford dictionary features a total of 218,632 words of which 171,476 are in current use and 47,156 obsolete words. For an average user obsolescence would be an obsolete word, for instance.
What this means is that as a civilization we are operating at less than five percent of our carefully compiled lexical resource. That figure changes dramatically for a handful of children in America around this time of year when the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee is held. The spellers who take part in the National Spelling Bee give you the feeling that at the very least they know nearly 100 percent of exists in the dictionaries. They may never use almost any of what they spell in the championship but they all know about the existence of a vast majority of the vocabulary.
Take for example the word that led to a tie between Vanya Shivashankar and Gokul Venkatachalam. The 14-year-old Gokul spelled nunatak which according to the Oxford dictionary means “An isolated peak of rock projecting above a surface of inland ice or snow.” There is every possibility that the word has hardly, if at all, been used since its Eskimo origin in the late 19th century. Yet, here we have Gokul Venkatalachalam spelling it right to tie the National Spelling Bee with Vanya Shivshankar who spelled “scherenschnitte”, a German term for cut-paper art.
The stunning domination of American children from families of Indian origin has been a subject of much comment and calumny on social media. Much of what one hears is undisguisedly racist stemming from profound cultural insecurities. Notwithstanding, these children persist internalizing entire dictionaries without any trace of a lexical indigestion. When one watches the Spelling Bee one can visualize words trapped inside the fusty pages of the dictionaries in hand-to-hand combat to be picked by those at the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee are in charge of choosing them. These words are dying of a lack of use and air. They are all grateful that some of them get the rare honor of a walk outside the pages of the dictionaries.
It is easy to deride these children because they cause among people a debilitating sense of inadequacy. It is equally tempting to ridicule their parents,many of whom must ben breathing down their necks for months before the Bee. They are seen as parents bent on destroying their children’s childhood because they want to live out their own fantasies through their offspring. It is possible that a lot of it does indeed happen but I am fairly certain a good many of the spellers themselves enjoy rescuing words struggling for life inside the dictionaries. Or so I tell myself because in my childhood in the Ahmedabad of the 1960s I could have easily become one of their forbears. Of course, we were greatly involved in many physical pursuits as well, including playing cricket for entire days on the unpaved, pebble strewn streets in temperatures touching 45 degrees Celsius or about 113 F .
I have my own share of cynicism about the idea of children being able to spell any random words and whether all this amounts to anything truly creative. That is a matter for another day. For now, my main grouse is entirely sartorial. Must these children, particularly boys, be dressed up in khaki Dockers or Chinos that rise practically to their chest and T-shirts that are two sizes too big? There are several words for badly dressed. Dowdy is just one of them.