May 30, 2007 9:47
You can take this oubliette and, uh, spell it
Curious Capitalist Jr. has asked me to write a post about his friend's older brother, Paul Lindseth, who made it to the quarterfinals of the 80th Scripps National Spelling Bee today before meeting his Waterloo in the word "oubliette." Which apparently means "a concealed dungeon having a trap door in the ceiling as its only opening." What's up with that?
Clearly, the kids who make it to National Spelling Bee can spell every arguably English word in existence. So the organizers have to search the weird fringes of the dictionary for words like oubliette and another big dream-smasher today, "Bewusstseinslage." I speak German reasonably well and I barely know what that means. Plus, it's really spelled Bewußtseinslage. This is un-American, people! It's Wahnsinn!
In other CC Jr. news, I can report that he (sort of) got the joke of an Onion story for the first time today ("I Believe in Evolution, Except for the Whole Triassic Period") and that he proposed an excellent new advertising tagline for Citibank ("Citibank: Come get your money"). I'm so proud.
Update: In the comments, alert reader Henri Tournyol du Clos points me to the Wikipedia entry on the German Spelling Reform of 1996, which decrees that the ß is now used only after long vowels, and the AP Germany confirms that the "u" in Bewusstsein does not count as a long vowel. Another interesting thing I learned from that Wikipedia page was that my boss, Rick Stengel, is apparently misspelling his last name:
Vowel changes, especially ä for e, are to be made to conform with derived or otherwise close forms
* Stengel → Stängel (stalk) because of Stange (bar)
Update 2: Time.com is all over this National Spelling Bee story, with a then-and-now gallery of past winners.
About The Curious Capitalist
Justin Fox is TIME's business and economics columnist. This is his blog. About the Authors
Barbara Kiviat just celebrated her 5-year anniversary covering business and economics for TIME magazine. About the Authors
RSS Feed
 |
Daily Email
Recent Posts
- Schwarzman's accounting trial balloon gets thoroughly aerated
- What Starbucks should be doing is charging to use the bathroom
- Danes still the happiest, even if they won't say hello at the grocery store
- Why free trade and globalization aren't quite the same thing
- Sheldon Adelson finally begins to penetrate the national consciousness
The Curious Capitalist Archives
July 2008
Choose a day to view events.
<< Previous Months
Blog Roll
- Going Private
- Calculated Risk
- Nicholas Carr
- Brad DeLong
- Econbrowser
- Econlog
- John Gapper
- Herb Greenberg
- Paul Kedrosky
- Ezra Klein
- Adam Lashinsky
- Michael Mandel
- Greg Mankiw
- Marginal Revolution
- Matt McAlister
- Megan McArdle
- Mike Moffatt
- Floyd Norris
- Roger Parloff
- James Pethokoukis
- Barry Ritholtz
- Felix Salmon
- Mark Thoma
- Amit Varma
Reader Comments (2)
An oubliette in French, from the verb oublier, to forget, is a cell that in medieval times was used for perpetual confinement purposes. It thus did not necessarily have a door - though most in fact did and did not differ in any way from ordinary cells - and a few of them indeed were only reached through a hole in the ceiling. The word is of widespread figurative use in modern French.
ß and ss : ach, here we go again on the endless matter of the Gertman spelling reform of 1996 (if you really have nothing better to do, you can check : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_spelling_reform_of_1996). Frankly, I do wish that one had been confined for good to the oubliettes.
Posted by Henri Tournyol du Clos | May 31, 2007 3:52 AM
I think that anyone familiar with literature (or online gaming) has heard the term "oubiliette".
But that german word? I don't think I've ever seen before today.
Posted by p_lukasiak | May 31, 2007 8:21 AM