Where do they get these words they're having these kids spell in the National Bee?  "Guerdon" was the winning word this year. I am 38 years old and I've studied and taught languages for over twenty years, and I have never, to my knowledge, encountered this word.

But 13 year old Sameer Mishra (from West Lafayette, Indiana, no less) has.  And he whooped its ass.  This was actually his fourth Bee.  So he definitely deserves to be guerdoned for his hard work and persistence. And he will be: to the tune of thirty-five Gs.

Can you imagine if people actually spoke Spelling Bee English though?  We'd all be secernents (some of us in the shape of alcarrazas, no doubt, wearing sheitels) of tralatitious semasiological bibelots.

Um, no thanks.

Words are a little like shoes.  It's best to stick to sensible ones for day-to-day business, and break out the Amedeo Testonis only for extra-special occasions (like maybe a Spelling Bee).  Comfort and fit should inform your casual verbal choices.  Of course, it's not necessary to go off in the other extreme, and don your flip-flops, the footwear equivalent of "ooga-ooga," all the time.  We have different kinds for different occasions.  You don't wear flip-flops to the Oscars, and you wouldn't wear your A. Testonis to the beach.

"Guerdon" may not be an A. Testoni, exactly (it is only two syllables long, after all), but it's not a flip-flop, either.  I'd put it somewhere in the Crockett & Jones Compton to New & Lingwood Stamford Loafer range.  Still, not too shabby. 

Humbled by Sameer's knowledge and earnings, I busted out my beloved compact unabridged OED, to make sure those Bee people aren't just making shit up. I mean, who would know?  Come to find they didn't make "guerdon" up, Chaucer did, sometime in the 14th century. 

Chaucer and Shakespeare are two of the boldest wordsmiths in English, of course.  Chaucer's English is so bold, some scholars debate whether it started out as English at all.  Wherever you fall on the issue, it ended up that way, and we have words like "guerdon" now to prove it.  The burning question in certain Literary Circles of Hell as to whether Chaucer invented "literary English" from continental sources, or drew from "traditional" English aside, his handiwork has been a boon for the Spelling Bee business.

"Guerdon," which Chaucer spelled g-e-r-d-o-n, didn't exactly catch on like wildfire, bumbling around down the centuries, picking up a "u" to hang on its "g" in the fifteenth century, and emerging into full splendor in the nineteenth century where it enjoyed currency among poets, priests and politicians, fading and finally plucked, and pressed in a book of poems somewhere around the turn of the twentieth.

Poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox's "Guerdon," written in 1917, seems a fitting eulogy...

Upon the white cheek of the Cherub year
    I saw a tear.
Alas! I murmured, that the Year should borrow
    So soon a sorrow.
Just then the sunlight fell with sudden flame:
    The tear became
A wond'rous diamond sparkling in the light—-
    A beauteous sight.

Upon my soul there fell such woeful loss,
    I said, "The cross
Is grievous for a life as young as mine."
    Just then, like wine,
God's sunlight shone from His high Heavens down;
    And lo! a crown
Gleamed in the place of what I thought a burden—-
    My sorrow's guerdon.

It's been resurrected in the guise of a baby name by the Trueblood family with some success.  Guerdon Trueblood, who directed 1973's The Candy Snatchers, acted in '77's Hollywood Meat Cleaver Massacre, and wrote Jaws 3-D, but has otherwise remained relatively obscure (Guerdon Trueblood II is a digital compositor).

My guess is Sameer Mishra's spelling bee win will spawn a brief flurry of interest in "guerdon," but by tomorrow morning it will return to the shoebox in the back of the top shelf of the closet, remaining strictly a dress-word, as arguably it should. After all, you need a good loafer to wear to those National Bee awards ceremonies.  And with his winnings, Sameer can definitely afford those New & Lingwoods.