22 December 2003Television
Can You Use That in a Sentence Please?
I just saw the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee on ESPN2 and I was struck by a couple of things that I thought I needed to share with y'all.
One is that there is probably not a single contestant among the 16 year old and under entrants in the bee who would score higher on the verbal section of the GRE than I just did.
Two is that there is high ratio of kids in the bee who will be thrown in lockers, tossed into garbage cans and otherwise humiliated during high school to those who will actually enjoy the secondary educational experience.
Three is that despite some incredibly challenging words in the competition such as pococurante (the winning word), lebhaft, voussoir, yamamai, guichet, rhathymia, peirastic and symphily (all of which, interestingly, show up as misspelled in MS Word), the contestants would have an easier time spelling these words than each other's last names.
Congrats to Sai Gunturi, the 2003 National Spelling Bee champ.
Posted by andrew at December 22, 2003 11:02 AM
Comments
Yes, there's nothing like watching a 12-year old girl cry when she can't spell SERIATIM.
Check your local listings. It might be on ESPN2 again. In fact, I guarantee it will be.
Did you see Spellbound? It a docudrama following 7 of the contestants in the 1999 spelling bee. It was truly amazing to see how much time and energy the contestants spent preparing for this event.
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Awww! I missed the spelling bee? I love that thing! I dunno why! But you're right. The goal is to not know the meanings but how to spell words from different language roots. It's still fun to watch tho.