When I was a boy I twice competed in the state spelling bee, once in fifth grade and once in seventh. Our schools there and then (ie, Anchorage in the late 1970s) were structured with elementary school up to sixth grade, and junior high school for seventh and eighth. There was no "middle school". High school, which was excluded from the official spelling bee, began with ninth grade.

Strangely, I do remember who won the bee for my schools in both sixth and eighth grade (Shannon Porter and Ken Hill, respectively, both boys and neither widely perceive as "smart kids"). I have no memory of my own participation in sixth grade. I assume I lost in the school bee. My memory of eighth grade it pretty dim, too, but I vaguely recall that I chose not to participate. Even then I was not very competitive nor ambitious for honors.

I remember both of the state bees. In fifth grade I placed 17th. Alaska was a small state in terms of population, but that was still pretty good for a fifth-grader, particular since I was two years younger than others in my grade. The word that knocked me out was katzenjammer, which was completely unfamiliar to me at the time. I starting spelling "c-a-", then I pondered for a bit, then I looked to the judge and said, "That's wrong, isn't it?" I just remember that's how it happened, not what I was thinking. Did I realize, in my pondering, that I should have started with K, or did I see from the judge's face that I had already blown it?

My memory tells me that when I returned in the seventh grade I was among the favorites, though I'm not sure how I know that. Perhaps I just imagined it. It seems reasonable, though. Alaska was a small state then, and there were only eight or nine large schools at the junior high level. The kids who came out of those schools would logically be the top candidates, and perhaps someone took note of my good showing two years earlier.

If anyone was betting on me, I gravely disappointed them. I was knocked out early. I don't recall if it was the first round or the second, but certainly no later than that. The word I missed was avocado. I actually knew how to spell avocado, and I knew that I knew it. Somehow I carelessly managed to say the letters wrong anyway. I spelled it a-v-a-c-a-d-o. I remember being dumfounded when I was declared incorrect. I hadn't even realized my error as I was saying it.

The Spanish word for lawyer is abogado, which is cognate with our advocate. If your city has a Hispanic population, you may well have seen advertisements for abogados. The word looks and sounds a lot like avocado (which incidentally resembles advocate even more closely), leading one to wonder if they're related.

Merriam Webster doesn't support the idea. It tells me only that our avocado derives from Spanish aguacate, their name for the same fruit, which they adapted from the native Nahuatl word aguacatl. (It also tells me that the Nahuatl word, in Nahuatl, also means "testicle". How many botanical words do we have that do the same, I wonder. I know orchid means "testicle" in Greek. I'll bet there's more.)

But looking in Doug Harper's Online Etymology Dictionary, I see my suspicion is not amiss. There I read the added detail that our English word comes not directly from Spanish aguacate, but from a Spanish variant, avocado, which in turn comes from a folk etymology that connects the fruit with the word for lawyer.

(Yes, the avocado is a fruit, not a vegetable. And yes, if you saw "guaca" in there and suspected that guacamole must be related, you're absolutely right.)

Aguacate is clearly a Spanish spelling. I assume that the first consonant sound is really a "w". The "w" sound does not occur naturally in Spanish without another consonant directly in front of it, except in a few words beginning in hue- (eg, huevos = eggs).

When Spaniards ventured abroad and encountered the "wa" sound in other languages, they sometimes rendered it as "hua". More often they put a g in front; in many dialects of Spanish, the g in "gua" is pronounced so softly that it is nearly silent anyway. From the Uto-Aztecan languages (of which Nahuatl is the primary one, the lingua franca of colonial Mexico) we have saguaro (sometimes spelled sahuaro), aguacate and Nahuatl itself. In the Quechua language of the Inca, the "h" spellings are preferred, as seen in the names of numerous Inca princes, such as Huáscar, Huayna, and Atahualpa.

All the place names in Spain beginning in "Guadal-", including those which later lent their names to places abroad which became better known (eg, Guadalajara, Guadalcanal, Guadalupe), derive from Arabic, in which wadi means river (but with the desert connotation of a valley that is often empty but sometimes fills with flash floods). Arabic likes to attach the definite article to almost any noun, and the standard formulation for naming a river is to follow wadi with a noun that names or describes it, with an article on both. For example, Guadalquivir, the river of Sevilla and Córdoba, is al-wadi al-kabir, "the great river". Guadalupe is a macaronic name, in which Arabic al-wadi joins with Latin noun lupus to signify "river of wolves".

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