Great Spellers

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, good afternoon.

Hi, who’s this?

Well, my name is Joanne Yurchison, and I’m calling you from Lynchburg, Virginia.

So, what can we help you with?

Well, my husband and I, we love doing a program on our iPhones called Words With Friends.

And it’s basically Scrabble, but you get to play with people from all over the world.

How would you like to play with Grant?

I play that. Look me up.

I don’t think I want to play with you, Gary.

No, I lose all the time.

I lose about 20% of the time, so you got a good shot at it.

20%?

Well, you must be playing with some really good people.

Anyway, so the question came up one night.

My husband said, well, what do you call a spelling expert?

And I said, you know, I don’t know.

I don’t know what you’d call someone who’s an expert at spelling.

So that’s where the discussion started.

Well, I call her Martha Barnette.

Oh, I was going to say that myself.

Aww.

Yeah, Martha did quite winningly at a spelling bee the other day.

She was remarkable.

Yeah, it was great.

Oh, congratulations.

Yeah, we were doing a literacy benefit, and Martha just, like, cleaned house.

It was great.

I bet she did.

Well, you know, a few years of Latin help you spell words like imputrescible and nudicodate,

Which I had never even heard of.

Exactly.

Yeah, it’s good to have that Latin background.

It sure is.

Well, who’s the expert speller in your home?

I think I’m definitely the better speller.

So she is Martha. What do we call her? There’s a couple words for that, right?

There are a couple of words.

The word for an expert speller is orthographer.

Or orthographist sometimes.

Oh, wow.

You can kind of break the roots down there and see the graph part means to write and the O-R-T-H-O part means…

It means straight or correct, like you go to the orthodontist to correct your teeth.

Exactly, yeah.

That kind of thing.

And we’ll give you a bonus word.

The opposite, a bad speller, is a cacographer.

How do you spell that?

K-A-K-A.

Well, it’s a C.

It’s with Cs.

I know.

I’m being one.

C-A-C-O-G-R-A-P-H-E-R.

Cacographer.

And the root there is the Greek word kakos, which means bad.

Yep.

Like cacophony.

Oh, okay.

Well, that would be my husband.

Very good.

I’ll tell you, if you want to play Words with Friends with me, by all means invite me.

I have a lot of games going, but I’ll give it a shot.

Grant Barrett at gmail.com.

I’d love to take you guys on.

Whoa, Joanne.

All right.

It was great to talk to you today.

Oh, it was fun to talk to you guys.

Thanks for letting me on your show.

Our pleasure.

Give our best to your husband.

I will do.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Families argue about a lot of things, Martha.

You and I are not a family, but we argue a lot.

We’re a virtual family.

We’ll help you unravel the tangles that you’ve made with your loved ones,

If they’re about language and grammar anyway.

The rest of it you can just take to the courts or your counselor.

You’re out of luck.

Call us 877-929-9673 or send us email to words@waywordradio.org.