English Has a Bee in Its Bonnet

Welcome to the new Lexicon Valley from Booksmart Studios! On today’s episode: What is a spelling bee, anyway? Why do spelling bees pair particularly well with the English language? And we’ll explore the tempting but complex prospect of spelling reform. Plus: A special subscriber-only bonus segment, to show you what you can get if you become a paying subscriber to Booksmart Studios. * FULL TRANSCRIPT * JOHN McWHORTER: From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, I'm John McWhorter. Earlier this month, a 14-year-old, Zaila Avant-garde from Louisiana, became champion of the 93rd annual, mostly annual, spelling bee — it went on hiatus for three years during World War Two and then again last year because of you know what — the mostly annual Scripps National Spelling Bee. AVANT-GARDE: Wait, what is the language of origin? MODERATOR: It's formed in Latin from a Swedish name. AVANT-GARDE: Murraya. M-U-R-R-A-Y-A. MODERATOR: That is correct. Avant-garde beat out the second-place finisher, Chaitra Thummala. She got tripped up by this compound word: neroli oil. THUMMALA: Neroli oil? MODERATOR: Yes, it's a fragrant, pale yellow essential oil that darkens on standing, is obtained from the flowers, especially of the sour orange, and that is used chiefly in cologne and other perfumes and as a flavoring material. THUMMALA: Neroli oil? MODERATOR: Neroli oil. THUMMALA: Are there any alternate pronunciations? MODERATOR: I see just the one. THUMMALA: Neroli oil. Um, language of origin? MODERATOR: The first part of the entry contains, consists of a French element derived from an Italian geographical name. The second part went from Greek to Latin to French to English. THUMMALA: Neroli oil. N-E-R-E-L-I O-I-L. Neroli oil. MODERATOR: Neroli oil is spelled N-E-R-O-L-I O-I-L. THUMMALA: Thank you. This 12-year-old Chaitra was composed up there on stage. But when you flub a word, when you're that close, that's gotta sting. And I know it does because the only spelling bee I was ever in when I was six or seven years old was one where I was so confident and frankly, I was a good speller. They asked me how to spell cement and I just rattled off S-E-M-E-N-T. It was just a mistake. I knew it was C and that took care of me and I never got to go again and I had frankly never gotten over it. Come to think of it, have you ever seen an Italian spelling bee? Have you ever heard of Russians doing spelling bees? I doubt it because there's something peculiar about English that makes it particularly bee-worthy. Today on Lexicon Valley, English Has a Bee in Its Bonnet. WHY IS IT CALLED A SPELLING BEE? The spelling bee, the National Spelling Bee, has been in the news in particular because Zaila Avant-garde, the winner, is a Black young woman. We have a historic win by someone who seems to be in a great many regards a superhuman. So to spell, where does that come from? Well, originally, what the word spell meant was to tell, the idea being that by doing this spelling, we're making the words tell us what they mean. And so to spell was to recount, to explain, to tell, at a time when the word tell did exist, but tell originally meant to count. And so that's why we say to tell the time, and that's why a bank teller is a teller. The idea is that this person is counting money. And then there's also bee. We're used to hearing about spelling bees and you kind of let it go by. But think about what an odd word that is. It's a spelling bee and it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the insects bees. So why is it a bee? And the fact is, you might know that you can extend that usage. Spelling bee is the most common, especially with modern life. But you can have a quilting bee where a bunch of people got together and made a quilt or a logging bee where people would, well I guess the idea was to gather the logs there on the river or something like that. You can see that I'm a city boy, but there used to be a logging bee where a bunch of, I presume, men would get together and do whatever they were going to do with those logs. Or a raising bee. How do you build a barn? Well, you have a raising bee? So the idea is a group of people come together in some endeavor and create or get something accomplished. Why is that a bee? And the reason is almost certainly not because it's like a bunch of bees coming together. It's tempting. But why would people say that? Why would people say, let's have a bee? You know, you don't look at bees swarming and say oh look at the bees beeing. Or, oh look over there, it's a great big swarm, it's a big fat bee. So why would people say let's have a quilting bee, as opposed to, say, a bee in or let's have a quilting bees’ nest or something. It just doesn't work. And actually there is an obscure dialectal word been. And what a been is and not a bean as in that — is it a fruit or a vegetable, whatever it is — not that bean, but a been is also something someone does for someone else. And it did also refer specifically to what the people lower on the social scale might do for a lord during feudal times. And so it's a been that they do. It's related possibly to boon. So you can have a been. That is plausibly where this word bee would have come from. But the problem is, why don't we call it a quilting been? Why don't we call it a spelling been? Why did the n drop off? Now, sounds drop off the ends of things all the time, but not all the time. And so, for example, if we're going to say that people first started saying, well, why don't we have a quilting been, and then they kind of leave off the n: quilting bee, whatever. Well, then why do we have words like clean and bean? That same person might say: why don't we have some beans tonight? I loves me a cranberry bean. And then after a while, cranberry bea. I don't know who this person is, but that kind of n doesn't drop off usually. And so what happened here? You have to go further and I'm not sure that anybody has. But I'm going to pick up the story here and take it further in a way that I think most linguists and etymologists would consider plausible. The way that you went from been to bee was because been would have felt like a plural word. And so people would have knocked the n off and just said bee. Stay with me. So, it used to be that in English, let's go back to Middle English. plurals were usually with s. And so you're talking about horses and chairs, et cetera. But then there were a whole lot of plurals that ended with n. We've only got a few now, like children and oxen. But it used to be, for example, that you had eyen and earen. You had in your mouth tonguen, if you happened to have two tongues. You talked about housen, you had shoen rather than shoes. You still do in some varieties of Scottish. You had not trees but treen. That sort of thing was common. Well, if you have a situation where you hear words ending in n as possibly plural, then you have this quilting been and it's a whole bunch of people doing it and that leads you to think of plurality. Quilting been would have felt like it was a plural, especially in Middle English. And so some people would have said quilting bee to make it singular. So an analogy is that the original word for that little delicious green thing shaped like a ball, it was a pease. But because pease sounds plural, people started saying, well, why don't I take this one little pea in my hand? Nothing like slicing a pea. You don't usually deal with them singly, but if you did, that's where pea comes from. Or it used to be that you had, because in French it’s cerise for a cherry. You had a cherries, it was taken from French. So une cerise  and then a cherries. But that sounds like what it sounds like to us. And so you make up a word cherry. If you've got eyen and earen and tonguen and housen, well then if you've got been: well let's have a raising been. But shouldn't we be making that just one bee, right? And so that's how that would have arisen. And so that's why we talk about a spelling bee. WHY ARE SPELLING BEES MOSTLY AN ANGLOPHONE PHENOMENON? Another interesting thing about spelling bees is that, you know you think of it as something universal, like lemonade. You go to Helsinki and you spend six weeks in Helsinki and you get a yen for some lemonade. I was reading The Power Broker by Robert Caro to assuage my homesickness for New York and I wanted some lemonade. Couldn't find it. They had all sorts of other fruit ades, but they did not have lemonade. You'd think that you'd get it everywhere, but you can't. It's just that sort of thing. And in the same way, do you think you can get peanut butter and jelly everywhere? I haven't checked, but I am quite sure that if you spent six weeks in Bangkok, you'd find that people are very little inclined to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Spelling bees are something similar in that it's largely an Anglophone phenomenon because of English’s shitty spelling. If you think about it, a spelling bee doesn't make sense if you have a human and sensible spelling system. Let's take Finland again. Finnish is a language with a very regular, sensible spelling system. It's hard to misspell something if you're a Finn. So to have those little blond kids standing up and spelling things, it would be kind of boring because spelling itself just isn't that hard once you've learned the basics. Or, you know, many more of us, I'm sure, are familiar with Spanish. Imagine a spelling bee in Spanish. Some people would be better at it than others. But for the most part, it wouldn't be very exciting because Spanish’s spelling system has its wrinkles — there are things that you have to know, especially about the diacritics — but it makes sense. That is certainly not true in English. And so not only do we have words from a great many languages, but we have a spelling system that basically stopped moving in the 1400s, whereas the whole vowel system turned upside down. And that means that we have a system that lends itself