Poll: chickabiddy

In My Humble Opinion
1

chickabiddy

This word is on the Scripps 2012 School Spelling Bee Study List.

[ul]
[li]I know this word, and could use it in a sentence correctly with confidence.[/li][/ul][ul]
[li]I can recall reading or hearing this word before, but don’t really know what it means.[/li][/ul][ul]
[li]I’m not familiar with this word at all.[/ul][/li]
If you honestly think you know this word, could you please give the definition of your understanding before looking it up?

Note: This poll is not about whether you could spell the word at a spelling bee.

2

It’s a term of endearment for a baby or child.
A friend of mine uses the word in her business name.
I also heard chickabiddy (autocorrect wants to make it ‘chicks biddy’) this past fall when my son was in his school spelling bee. IIRC, the definition was given as “a term of endearment, especially for a fat, happy baby.”

3

Answer: Answer: Nope.

4

Must be a regional thing, because I’ve never heard it in Ohio. Or Georgia. Or Colorado. My sister lives in Omaha…I’ll ask her if she’s heard of it. They don’t know from butter knives there, she says…

5

This is the first time in my 50+ year life I’ve ever seen or heard of this word.

6

I have never seen or heard this word before. I guessed it might be some sort of term of endearment, but I didn’t think of babies necessarily.

7

I figured on it being a term for nosy old ladies, so clearly I’m off the mark.

8

The only place I’ve ever seen it is in a children’s book, Dancing Shoes, by Noel Streatfeild, which is set in England.

9

When I saw it in the title, I assumed it was some new slang word for a skanky woman.

10

I would have guessed that it referred to a woman who kept her good looks well into her old age.

11

From the poll results, it seems clear this isn’t a common word, and it’s not useful for some specialized field. So what’s the point of having such a word on a spelling bee? Granted, because of its phonetics and its recognizable constituent parts, most contestants could probably pull this off simply by guessing. Still, it makes me wonder exactly what a spelling bee is supposed to measure.

12

Since when are spelling bees intended to measure anything other than one’s ability to spell, anyway? The Scripps bee measures the contestants’ ability to memorize pages of the dictionary. Nothing more. (okay, and root word formations for recognizing previously-unencountered words)

13

Of course, but that’s not the question. The question is: “Spell what?” After a point, it’s no longer about the “ability to spell,” and it’s simply a question of luck in guessing, because the words are obsolete or obscure, with distant orthographic histories.

How about /θɑt/ (a rower’s bench), or /mƐkl/ (adulterous), /tʃat/ (a snack)? It’s not possible to recognize a “previously-unencountered” word (by definition of the word recognize). A student that spells those words correctly is either just lucky at guessing or has wasted a lot of his or her time perusing words discarded from usage.

If we want to get student buy-in on spelling bees, we need to use words that have at least the semblance of currency.

14

OTOH, I’ve lived in Georgia all my life to date, and I definitely know this word.

Whether I learned it from someone IRL or from books/tv is a separate question, though.

15

I think I’d remember having encountered a word like that, and I don’t.