when ESPN runs the Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee finals.
I love it.
I sort of picture a conversation like this...
Lunkhead 1: Yo Vinnie, what the fuck are all these little kids that look like miniature 7-11 owners doing on ESPN?
Lunkhead 2: Some sort of gay spelling bee shit. And they ain't spelling real words neither. I think it's like...Vulcan words...or some shit like that.
Lunkhead 1: How come all the white kids are losing?
Lunkhead 2: Cuz them's Klingon words...and Klingon is like close to Indian or whatever...it's some sort of dialect of towelhead I think.
Lunkhead 1: Fuck. And they took off dwarf-tossing for this shit?
I love watching this. I was a champion speller in school (you'll ask "What happened?") and made it to state but just missed nationals. I was too nervous a kid. I would spell words wrong I knew just because of the crowd. Ugh.
I just saw my "Words of the Champions" preparation guide from the old competition the other day when I was moving books.
ESPN was rerunning the 2008 just now and I was having fun, closing my eyes and seeing how many of the words I could spell.
I could still get greater than 95% of them correct.
But there were words I would have never gotten.
You can win the National Championship if you get lucky with what words you draw.
I could spell "hyphaeresis" and "prosopopoeia" easily, but words like "thymele" and "posaune" still tripped me up.
Some of the German origin words like the latter just nonplussed me.
Things I have in my house are not hard to spell lol...one girl got the word "rhyton."
Then they gave them some easy German ones like "Kulturkampf."
I'm three times as old as those kids now so I know what 90% + of the damn words mean and their origins.
But they always find some damn hard ones.
The French origin ones are generally used to torture the kids in the final rounds but those are easy for me. They just gave them "ecrase," "esclandre" and a bunch of others. But even though French spelling can be as eccentric as English spelling (I always say Spanish, Italian and even Russian spelling are cakewalks in comparison to those two!) once you know the "tricks" you're okay in French. More so than in English, I think.
They're evil in that they don't give the kids the meaning of the roots.
Take the girl who came in third and went out on "opificer." If they had said, "from the Latin word for 'work'" she would have realized "opus" instantly and cinched it.
Instead, the poor thing went with "epificer," which is actually how it sounded they way they were pronouncing it (which is wrong...he was keeping it ambiguous, the pronouncer, letting the opening vowel sound hover between a short e and a short o!)
I look very much forward to watching the 2009 Spelling Bee on Thursday night!
I have it d.v.r.'ed already.
Some of the kids whom I just saw crushed and dejected as they went down in flames (in 2008) will be back on Thursday to go for the orthographic laurels!
I wonder if the girl from Harrisburg will be back?
She finished in the top ten last year. I hope she's still okay age-wise!
I will be pulling for her if so.
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I was watching this today with Jesus, my busboy. He seemed deeply affected by the pressure the kids were under, especially when that one kid (as always)passed the f out. I have passed the f out a lot. I'm like a victorian lady (scandalamity!). I looked Jesus deeply in the eyes and told him, "Look, sometimes Mami just doesn't love you unless you win."
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