Oct. 22, 2001 - 20:59 MDT

THE WONDERING JEW

Excitement

In elementary school from second grade on one source of pleasurable fun for me was participation in the Spelling Bees. They were from our spelling list of the moment, and whether it was boy against girl or luck of the draw the fun was the same. To me it was like some other things, it was a competition against self. Trying to do better than before. My successes once in a while allowed me to more or less see where I stood academically. I never had the feeling of, "Boy did I ever whip your a__."

There were other things in our school that were companions to our spelling bees, pronunciation, enunciation and definition. We had to pronounce the word correctly, with proper enunciation and then give a decent definition and also give a sentence containing the word, before we spelled the word.

I would always take my spelling list home and surf the waves of Webster. Finding the word, reading the definitions - 1 st - 2 nd - 3 rd and sometimes more. Then reading the etymology and the national derivation, Latin, Greek, Erse and so on.

My excursion into the world of words would take me from the path of school work into satisfying my pure curiosity. When I would find the word I was looking for and get the gist there would always be one, two or more nearby words beckoning with their fingers.

Being an early reader I think helped me by osmosis to reach a decent degree of proper language usage that I had. Frustration came later I guess from the year of school I lost, where apparently the grounding and learning of the rules of grammar were inserted into young minds.

It really blew my mind that I could outspell others, pronounce words properly with correct enunciation, and knowing the definitions to a tee, being able to string words into sentences then paragraphs properly but yet fail miserably the formal grammar exercises.

My technical knowledge of grammar was sparse and still is, I learned that a noun was the name of something, a verb could be an action against a noun and that an adjective was something that sharpened a verb to a point. Never did find out what a predicate was or a participle or how to dangle one or what could be caught with one if delicately dangled. Parsing to my mind had something to do with parsnips which I hated. I could write a good sentence without trouble but couldn't name all the terms for those words, diagramming a sentence was Greek to this American boy.

Though my grades were failing in English, my joy of taking part in spelling bees was for me a whopping bit of quivering Excitement . . . . . .

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