Mrs. was flipping through channels after dinner last night and after a few minutes declared that there was nothing good to watch. I jokingly said, “What are you talking about? The spelling bee is on ESPN.” Now again, this was meant as a joke and Mrs. played along and turned it on. We watched for a few minutes during a part where they were profiling one of the finalists and then watched one kid spell . . . . and then two hours later we were still watching. Well of course we were. We were failing miserably at spelling the words (although we did get a few – hey, Mrs. wasn’t valedictorian for nothing), but we were transfixed. And of course the one (and possibly only) year we get invested in the spelling bee is the year none of the kids can miss and it goes twenty rounds (for comparison the 2010 event lasted only nine rounds). But nonetheless we stuck it out until the end (or at least I did, Mrs. had to ditch the end to watch the news, her favorite television program).
A few observations about the Scripps National Spelling Bee:
-What kind of parent pushes their kids into spelling? I mean you see parents (at least in made for TV movies) trying to live vicariously through their kids by pushing them in sports or music, but spelling? Are there parents out there threatening their child with “no more video games until you’ve read the dictionary” or “you’re not allowed to watch television until you’ve learned to correctly spell stromuhr”? I just don’t see it (unless they themselves suffered a devastating loss in the spelling bee years before and their kid is supposed to avenge them missing the second “r” in serrefine in 1985). Which leads me to think these kids must enjoy this. And maybe they do. I mean reading the dictionary can’t be worse than Ulysses.
-I must be softening in my old age, because there was a time when I would have mocked these kids (really dude, your hobby is memorizing the digits of pi?), but instead I found myself genuinely rooting for them to get the words right. I was spelling along with them (you know, once they showed the correct spelling on the screen) and felt bad for the kids when they got the word wrong. Maybe it’s just hard to root against kids that are 10-14 years of age (well, except for the “kid” with the deep voice and full mustache – I’m guessing he was around 35).
-I understand wanting to know the word origin and the definition; I’m sure that helps with figuring out the spelling of a particular word, but my favorite part of the competition is when the kids stall by asking the pronouncer to use the word in a sentence. I wanted the judge to respond, “Spell the word (insert difficult word with a silent “z” in the middle).” Hey, that’s a sentence.
-For those who weren’t lucky enough to devote almost 3 hours to the spelling bee last night, the winning word was “cymotrichous”. I didn’t come close.
-One last note that Mrs. insisted I mention - for some reason even though this is billed as the "National" spelling bee, there were several kids from Canada in the competition. Mrs. was perplexed that our National Spelling Bee was being infiltrated by children from "America's Hat". Did we miss the news about Canada becoming the 51st state?
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