On Tuesday, April 28, approximately 900 students and community members filled the chapel for A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg, part of Carleton’s recent alumni-sponsored Engaging Across Viewpoints series. President Alison Byerly herself moderated the conversation, posing a range of delicately phrased questions to Mayor Pete. While President Byerly is known around campus for her eloquence and use of a considerable vocabulary in her large and small-scale speaking engagements, she truly met her match in Buttigieg.
Over the approximate one hour and twenty minutes of the event, Buttigieg was spewing grandiose terminology left and right, so much so that early reports by linguistics and statistics professors who attended the event are starting to hypothesize that he may actually have said every word. That’s right; all of them. From A-Z. If verified, this would mark a sizeable achievement and a veritable world record for the fastest completion of this task ever recorded. Buttigieg would join last weekend’s viral running sensations in doing, in less than two hours, what some said could never be done in that time — and something that professional word reciters might well consider a ‘marathon’ of sorts.
However, like with any record-breaking runner, there have been some uncomfortable allegations made about Buttigieg’s almost unnatural ability to recall each and every word and use them well. An anonymous student who was selected to ask a question, and hence was able to be in the chapel slightly earlier, reported to The Carletonian that she noticed both dictionaries and thesauruses backstage, where Buttigieg had prepared for his speech. While there’s nothing inherently wrong about looking at a dictionary before making an attempt to say every word, aside from poor sportsmanship, the really troubling violation was discovered later on, with more thorough investigation.
The Carletonian infiltrated the chapel and, sure enough, found multiple Oxford English Dictionary volumes hidden in the pews like prayer books — it seems like Buttigieg’s team was not prepared for the level of wokeness employed by the Carleton College chapel in the removal of regular prayer books from the backs of benches. Each volume was examined, and the journalists on the task found something troubling – many words were missing, cut out as though with a box cutter. It wasn’t clear why, until we got to C.
The definition was at the top of the page. An adjective and noun, the adjective form meaning, “of geometric figures or objects: having a common centre or central axis, the larger often completely surrounding the smaller; arranged or described about the same centre or axis; sharing the same centre (with another figure, etc.)” The noun definition was listed below that. However, the word was missing — and this time it was not a clean cut. Instead, “concentric,” which would have been the first word on the page, had been torn out. Close examination under a microscope generously lent to The Carletonian by Nutting House revealed that the tear had been executed with teeth — someone had eaten the word.
This presented a much more drastic issue: international regulation prohibits contenders for the challenge of saying every word from eating, drinking or otherwise ingesting or imbibing any parts of speech less than 72 hours before the record-making attempt begins. Samples of the dictionary pages have been sent to the international committee’s lab for further testing, and if this story is verified, Buttigieg’s historic win will be stricken from the record. While this would certainly tarnish his own reputation, one can’t help but hope that it might open up a path for President Byerly to take a crack at the gargantuan challenge.
