As another year draws to a close, I once again find myself staring at my annual stack of notes full of words that, for varying reasons, never found their way into print. Some of these words are weird, some are obscure (to me at least) and there’s even one word that ticks me off – mostly for the way it was used. The one thing these words have in common is the fact that I found them all to be interesting in one way or another. I hope you agree.
Recently someone at my school asked me how often I subitize in public. Caught off guard, I ducked the question by eloquently firing back “Yeah, well, how often do you do it?” before scurrying off to google “subitize.”
It turns out that we all do it – a lot – and there’s nothing wrong with it. The definition of subitize (SOO-bi-tyz) is “to perceive, without counting, the number of objects in a small group,” like instantly being able to tell how many pips are showing on a pair of dice.
Another word I learned in school I can blame squarely on COVID and the remote learning it necessitated during the lockdown. “Asynchronous” is defined as “not simultaneous or concurrent in time.” Before the pandemic closed down the planet, most of our online training was done “on your own.” But thanks to all of the advanced computer training we received during that time, our administrators learned a new word and now most of our training is done asynchronously.
By the way, as you may know, when the letter A is added to the beginning of a word it becomes a prefix meaning “without” or “not” when forming an adjective, as in the cases of “asymmetrical ” (not symmetrical) or “atypical” (not typical).
Enough about school. A couple months ago a contestant on “Wheel of Fortune” lost out on a new car when the solution to the show’s prize puzzle for the category “What are you doing?” turned out to be “Obtaining my goals.”
The outcries on social media were loud and immediate. “I have heard of achieving, reaching, realizing & articulating goals, but how common is this phrase?” asked one bewildered fan on X.
I contend that the correct answer should have been “Attaining my goals,” since obtaining something is “to possess a tangible entity without much effort,” while attaining means “achieving or reaching something intangible by putting in effort.”
Closer to home, Mrs. Word Guy occasionally wonders – as do many other people – how someone is supposed to look up the correct spelling of a word when they don’t know how to spell it. I feel her pain, and so do the folks at Simon and Schuster, who’ve been publishing “Webster’s New Word Misspellers Dictionary,” which lists the most common misspellings of more than 15,000 frequently used words, since 1983.
So if you have trouble spelling the tricky words, you can take comfort in knowing that you’re not alone. According to Dictionary.com, some of the most misspelled words they see are: “Accomodate” (which is correctly spelled accommodate), “seperate” (separate), “liason” (liaison), “priviledge” (privilege), “enviroment” (environment), “recieve” (receive) and “greatful” (grateful).
Speaking of Mrs. Word Guy, it was her wondering aloud about “that cloudy white stuff” attached to the yolks in the eggs she was cracking that sent me running back to Google for another lookup.
It turns out that stuff she was worried about actually has a name – chalaza (kuh-LAY-zuh) – and is just a protein that helps keep the yolk centered in an egg, and is actually a sign of freshness.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll end here – I suddenly have the urge to go subitize in public.
Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.” He can be reached at jlwitherell19@gmail.com.
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