Tag: Cognitive focus and executive control

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. 

At the time, he thought he probably wanted to work in the church—when he painted himself as an adult for a class project, he dressed his grown-up self in a cassock. But after taking a class in nuclear chemistry at the local junior college in high school, he decided his backup plan was to become a nuclear engineer. So when he went to the University of Michigan, he enrolled in the school of engineering. While he did well and liked his courses, though, he soon realized he felt called to a career in the church after all. 

COURTESY OF BRIAN SIETSEMA

 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. 

Sietsema calls his four years at MIT a great adventure: “If I could relive them, I would empty out my bank accounts to do so.”

At MIT he worked with Morris Halle, one of the leaders in generative grammar, which Sietsema describes as a working model of the “chemistry” of language—the parts and processes that form the building blocks of verbal communication. Halle and others had developed counting procedures (akin to measured time in music) that help explain stress patterns (that is, which syllables might receive emphasis by varying such things as stress or pitch). Building on that work, Sietsema’s dissertation proposed that the division of words and phrases into metrical units similar to musical measures can be used to predict where high and low tones fall, which he demonstrated in the tonal patterns of four Bantu languages spoken in Tanzania. At the time, research in this area was seen to have implications for creating natural-sounding machine-
generated speech. 

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.)

When Sietsema graduated from MIT in 1989, the job market for linguists was “not great.” As fate would have it, though, Matt Alexander, PhD ’92, his best friend at MIT, had already been hired at the University of Michigan, where a one-year position as a visiting assistant professor of phonology opened up that spring. Alexander recommended Sietsema, who handed in his dissertation and got the job, earning an award for excellence in teaching based on student reviews in his first semester. 

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.  

Working at Merriam-Webster gave Sietsema access to what he describes as its “fantastic library of old books on every subject imaginable.” He seized the opportunity to delve into historical questions about the development of Christianity—something he’d been curious about. It struck him that Orthodox Christianity was the most original form of the faith that was still around. Having met Katherine Chapekis, a young linguist raised in the Greek Orthodox tradition, during his year teaching in Ann Arbor also nudged him in the direction of Orthodoxy. In 1991, he converted and they married, and she began working at Merriam-Webster the following year as a definer and researcher who tracked down first usages of English words.

AP PHOTO/CAROLYN KASTER

At the Greek Orthodox church in Springfield, Sietsema’s facility for languages proved useful when he served as a volunteer chanter, helping the priest lead services in Greek. “I do a good job with the liturgical Greek because I have the phonological knowledge to know how to make my mouth do the things that it needs to do to sound like authentic Greek speech as opposed to an American just rattling off Greek letters,” he says. 

He began taking evening classes in Byzantine chant, and before long the bishop was encouraging him to attend seminary. Merriam-Webster allowed him to work four 10-hour days so he could commute to Brookline to study at the Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. And after four years, he earned a master of divinity degree.

Sietsema fully intended to go back to being a lexicographer, perhaps eventually getting ordained so he could serve as a substitute priest on weekends. But he’d made what he jokingly calls “a terrible mistake” at the seminary: He’d embraced his studies so enthusiastically that he became the valedictorian and had to give the commencement speech. The archbishop of America—the head of the Greek Orthodox church in the US—came up from New York to attend the ceremony, and he happened to be in need of a deacon who could also serve as a speechwriter. “A few weeks later, I got a call from the archdiocese saying ‘We want you to be ordained, and we want you to come to New York, and we want you to write for the archbishop,’” Sietsema recalls. 

In short order, he and his wife moved to the Upper East Side of Manhattan so he could begin his new post as 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). As deacon to the archbishop and then to his successor, he wrote their speeches and encyclicals on top of many other duties—including chauffeuring them through New York City traffic—and traveled with them around the country and to Greece, meeting President Clinton, ambassadors, members of Congress, Elie Wiesel, and South Africa’s Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu along the way. But after two years, as the father of a newborn, he was eager to move on from a job that required putting in as many as 14 hours six or seven days a week. So in 2000, he returned to Michigan to become pastor of the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in Lansing.

“The World Series can be a four-game sweep and the Super Bowl can be a blowout, but the National Spelling Bee always comes down to one last word.”

Not long after settling into parish life, Sietsema got an unexpected call from the Scripps Spelling Bee. His wife had served on the event’s word panel from 1997 to 2000, and he had traveled with her to one of the members’ off-site gatherings in 1998. He’d tagged along to dinner one night, and they were pleased to meet the person who was responsible for pronunciations in the bee’s official dictionary. But now, just a few weeks before the 2003 event, there was a crisis: The longtime pronouncer had suddenly died. The veteran associate pronouncer would step into his role and take on the job of giving spellers their words, but a new associate pronouncer would be needed to answer spellers’ questions about word roots, monitor pronunciations, and be prepared to serve as the pronouncer if needed. Could he do it? Honored to be asked, Sietsema got the okay from his bishop and said yes. 

Little did he know it would become a permanent gig. After 15 years of answering root-word queries, when the bee expanded in 2018 he began serving as a pronouncer for some of the earlier rounds as well—though never for the finals. Now he’s the head of a team of associate pronouncers. “It’s just wonderful to see these young people blossom right in front of you, asking their questions and analyzing the word on the spot and figuring out how it all goes together,” he says. He dismisses the idea that the kids have photographic memories, saying they’re “really just good little word detectives.” 

As a member of the bee’s word panel, Sietsema attends multiple daylong meetings to create and fine-tune each year’s list by mining the 500,000 or so words in Merriam-Webster’s unabridged dictionary. “For an introductory round, you want something that’s an interesting word, a useful word, but something that’s gettable,” he says. “For the later rounds, you really want to find something that’s going to challenge the speller. And it’s nice to have a word that’s analyzable.” “Rooty” words—those with obvious roots—are ideal. 

The advent of unabridged online dictionaries has streamlined how students prepare for the bee, which once required wading through the dictionary manually to compile word lists. Today, it’s easy to generate lists of words derived from a particular language to study their roots, for example. Meanwhile, the competition has become increasingly fierce, and once-verboten terms like geographical names are considered fair game. For some of the words in the hardest rounds, “it looks like you’re just taking a spoonful of alphabet soup,” he says. “And that’s for the spellers who really, really are committed to learning just about every word they can in the dictionary.”

When it gets down to the last spellers in the final round, there’s an electric feeling in the room. “It’s always a close competition,” he says. “The World Series can be a four-game sweep and the Super Bowl can be a blowout, but the National Spelling Bee always comes down to one last word, and that’s what makes it exciting each and every time.”

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote that a characteristic of theologians is their “unfitness for philology,” meaning they can’t be trusted to interpret texts with objective accuracy. He also maintained that a sense of restraint characterizes a good linguist. Sietsema says he’s right on both counts. When linguists analyze texts, “we know what we don’t know, and that’s important because you don’t find meaning where it’s not in the original,” he says. He thinks the well-trained linguist has a mission to the world of theology: to help clarify what is an appropriate interpretation of a sacred text and what is going too far. 

He’s put his unique blend of skills into practice. In the early days of the covid pandemic, for instance, a Greek Orthodox scholar defended the practice of continuing to use a single spoon to administer communion. The scholar argued that holy things cannot cause harm and that abandoning them for fear of an earthly disease was far more dangerous than the disease itself, citing a passage from a homily of an archbishop of Constantinople in the fourth century CE saying “nothing is worse than to relegate spiritual things to human reasoning.” Sietsema responded with a thoughtful defense of reason, pointing out that the scholar’s argument relied on a mistranslation of logismoi, which he explained refers not to the faculty of reason but to negative mental habits, such as flawed reckonings, intrusive thoughts, or vain rationalizations. He countered that the church very much values reason and advocated “the exercise of good sense, good science, and compassion,” arguing that “those who pit faith against the faculty of reason end up losing one or the other or both.”

Sietsema’s time at MIT, he says, taught him to pay attention not only to what’s in data sets but also to what’s not there that could be. “That particular muscle gets used in both linguistic analysis and lexicography, as well as in pastoral care,” he says. “When you’re listening to people pour out their hearts, it’s important to notice what they’re saying and what they’re not saying.” 

COURTESY OF BRIAN SIETSEMA

As both a priest and a linguist, he’s called on to notice and remember. Attention to detail matters whether he’s gearing up for the celebration of Pascha, or Easter, at Holy Trinity or preparing for the National Spelling Bee, which he calls “the holy week of spelling.”

This spring, before heading to Washington for his 24th National Spelling Bee in May, Sietsema reflected on what words he might add to his list of favorites. A top candidate was one given to Evelyn Blacklock, a speller in his first bee as associate pronouncer in 2003: clepsydra, meaning an old-style water clock. “She didn’t know it, but through a series of questions to me about the Greek roots of the word—from kleptein (to steal) and hydōr (water)—she was able to divine the English spelling,” he recalls. “It was so satisfying to watch this feat of word sleuthing happen in real time, and it gave me a good insight into the importance of my role at the bee.”

It seems unlikely, however, that akimbo will ever lose top billing on his list. It’s easy to imagine Sietsema facing the future with his own hands on hips, elbows out, embracing linguistics, theology, and scientific reason as he shares his joy for life and the words we use to describe it.