Brian Sietsema, Linguist/Priest.

Alice Dragoon writes for MIT Technology Review about 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 me into dictionaries and being curious about etymology,” he says. It kindled a fascination with words—and an abundance of curiosity—that would shape his life’s trajectory and work.

Growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Sietsema attended a Dutch Reformed Christian school and recalls taking part in only one spelling bee, in second grade. It was in the 1970s, when everyone was hooked on phonics—so he overthought the sounding-it-out implications when asked to spell of. “I spelled it U-V, and of course, I was wrong,” he says. […]

Switching to the college of literature, science, and the arts, he chose the studies in religion major, taking advantage of the interdisciplinary freedom it offered to take classes in literature, art, and more. He also tucked in courses that would fulfill seminary prerequisites such as knowledge of the biblical languages, studying ancient Hebrew and ancient Greek as well as modern languages that might come in handy for theological scholarship (Dutch, Swedish, and modern Hebrew).

Being in Ann Arbor gave Sietsema “a different understanding of the wideness of the Christian world,” as he puts it, and he gradually became less sure about which church he wanted to work in. As he neared the end of his fourth year at Michigan, he still needed a few more pre-seminary courses—and it dawned on him that he’d taken an “awful lot” of languages and thoroughly enjoyed them. So he stayed on for a fifth year to study linguistics as well as German, ancient Aramaic, and modern Arabic. One of his professors encouraged him to go to grad school and insisted that he apply to MIT, which was considered the top linguistics program in the country. To his surprise, he got in.

At MIT he worked with Morris Halle […]. Sietsema calls Halle “a wonderful mentor,” and the two played well off one another. As he was sweltering in his Central Square apartment while printing the final version of his dissertation, Halle called and asked him to stop by. Knowing that Sietsema read Hebrew, Halle, a Latvian-born Jew who’d learned English as his sixth language, wanted to show him a syllable-counting analysis of the 23rd Psalm he’d just completed; Sietsema answered with his own structural analysis of Psalm 90. “I could tell he was delighted to have this young Gentile boy from Grand Rapids, Michigan, who had the same fascination for biblical Hebrew as he did,” Sietsema says.

Today, he calls his four horizon-expanding years at MIT a great adventure: “If I could relive them, I would empty out my bank accounts to do so.” Beyond embracing the intellectual stimulation of the Institute, he took advantage of Cambridge’s many cultural opportunities and cross-registered at Harvard to study French and Ugaritic. All told, he says, he’s now studied about a dozen languages, including the Latin he took in high school and the modern Greek he would add to his repertoire several years after earning his doctorate. (“I always feel like I’m leaving one out,” he says.) […]

Shortly after his one-year gig at Michigan ended, he returned to Massachusetts and landed a job as pronunciation editor at Merriam-Webster in Springfield. Although the work was very different from the theoretical linguistics he’d focused on in grad school, “as the guy who had studied a whole bunch of language back in undergrad, it was kind of coming home to old-school philology,” he says. His main job was to ensure that pronunciations—which can change—were up to date. Fluoride, for example, shifted from floo-o-ride in the early 1900s to flor-ide in the second half of the century.

At Merriam-Webster, he made the call on which pronunciations would go into the 10th edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary—and in what order of preference. The dictionary, he explains, takes a descriptivist approach that reflects common word usage, so he kept a radio and a TV on in the background as he worked. He’d listen for interesting pronunciations and record them on index cards, noting how each such word was said, who said it, where the person was from, and what the context was. These went into Merriam-Webster’s “huge files” of index cards containing citations of words in actual usage.

Sietsema also had a hand in identifying new words and usages that appeared in the 10th edition, which was initially released in 1993—and he was responsible for the inclusion of definitions for interjectional uses of like. He recognized three informal uses: to introduce a quotation (“So she was like, ‘Let’s go eat’”); to give an approximation (“There were like 10 people in line”); and to emphasize (“He was, like, gorgeous”) or convey something apologetically or vaguely (“I need to, like, borrow some money”). While not a fan of such usages, he recognized them as real linguistic phenomena that had earned a place in the dictionary.

During his tenure as pronunciation editor, he introduced the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet (a standard phonetic notation for all languages) into Merriam-Webster publications long before it became widely used in American mass-market dictionaries. He also oversaw the recording of pronunciations for digital versions of the dictionary and flew out to a San Diego recording studio to supervise the voice actors. When the actors refused to record certain words that offended them, Sietsema had to step into the breach and do it himself. If you go to www.merriam-webster.com and search for a choice two-part expletive the actor Samuel L. Jackson is famous for delivering, it will be his voice that you hear when you click on the icon of the speaker—offering a decidedly less memorable rendition.

Much more at the link, including the stories of how he became Father Mark (“he used his middle name because Orthodox priests must be ordained with a saint’s name, and there are no Orthodox Saint Brians”) and pronouncer for the Scripps Spelling Bee (“Sietsema got the okay from his bishop and said yes”). A tip o’ the Language Hat to Martin for the link!