A man of many words

Brian Sietsema has a favorite word. It’s somewhat surprising that he can choose just one. He’s the person spellers rely on to confirm pronunciations and answer questions about the roots of the words they’re given at the Scripps National Spelling Bee—arguably the world’s most prestigious competition of its kind. The story of how the word earned the top spot on his personal list may well mark the beginning of his unique career path as both a linguist and a Greek Orthodox priest. In third grade, Sietsema ventured to a garage sale at a friend’s house with 50 cents in his pocket and picked out three books that struck his fancy. Although they were priced at 50 cents each, his friend’s mother said the books he’d chosen were on special and sent him home with all three, including a collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories called Masterpieces of Mystery. Knowing it contained macabre tales like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” his own mother told him he’d need to wait a few years before reading it. Naturally, he started it right away. As he read “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” Sietsema was baffled by the main character’s description of arriving at the moon in a balloon. Pfaall reported tumbling into a crowd of people who were “eyeing me and my balloon askant, with their arms set a-kimbo.” Sietsema had never encountered the word akimbo (with or without a hyphen) and asked his parents what it meant. They didn’t know, and it wasn’t in the family’s dictionary. The question also stumped his teachers, and the dictionaries in his classroom and the school library were no help either. “For years, I didn’t know what this word meant,” Sietsema says. It stuck in his mind that there was a word out there that he, his parents, and his teachers didn’t know. He thinks it wasn’t till he got to college that he finally found a dictionary with the answer: The moon dwellers in Poe’s story had been standing with their hands on their hips, elbows turned outward. “I credit that puzzle with getting