I didn’t get to see the end. Who won?
For the part I did see, I was generally disappointed in the fairness.
The difference in difficulty of some of these words is just shocking. The annoying girl that pauses and breathes into her hands between each letter (can’t remember her name) got “penury” at one point! Penury! In the finals! That’s a common word, and pretty easy to spell at that. I think most people would have difficulty misspelling it if they tried. How else could it conceivably be spelled? OTOH, the kids all around her are getting shit like “filiciform” and “maieutic.” There were a couple of other words that I thought were (relatively) easy, like “demiurge” and “lederhosen.” Not sure i could have spelled them at age 13, but still a cakewalk compared to the other words that don’t even make it into most of my dictionaries.
Anyone else think that the judges need to do a better job of word selection to make it more balanced?