lorgnette was my come-uppance (spring, 1970). And I still have to look it up!
You do realize that this mother will be suing the school again in a year or so for not offering enough/good enough ‘enrichment’ courses for her next bear cub’s needs.
The school board’s reply “We wasted, er spent, that money on a stupid spelling bee lawsuit.”
Wait … what? You had “cautious” and “rancid” at Regionals? When I came in 3rd place, I was knocked out by “fluoridated,” which I still often spell incorrectly the first time, because it just doesn’t look right. The winning word was “pteranodon.”
And yet, I work for a man who frequently spells “the” incorrectly in emails. Le sigh.
Well, “floridated” ought to be a word.
“My grampa got tired of living up north because of the cold winters, so he Floridated.” 
I wish I could find a link to the Far Side cartoon of “Primitive Spelling Bees.”
Caveman #1: “Cave. C-A-V-E. Cave.”
Caveman #2: (thinking)“Oh, great. I’ll probably get Australopithecus.”
Yep. This was in the Florida panhandle. Of course, I had studied my list like mad, WITH the hard words, so I was kind of surprised we were getting such easy words. I honestly think the words at our school bee were more difficult.
E.
I got knocked out in our municipal spelling bee by “quondam”. I’m never, ever, ever going to forget how to spell that word. Ever. Even if I try.
Yes it was.
That wasn’t funny.
Three chairs for the three guests of honour!
Huh. I must be the only poster who never won a spelling bee. Hell, I never even won at the individual class level. Spell check is my best friend. at one point ( I think 9th grade or so), we had a battery of standadized tests. Got the results, every category but one I scored in the high 90’s. Spelling? 47th percentile.
Aww. Below standad.
see? I said spell check was my friend - I don’t use my friends. 
( :smack: )
I feel so left out. I don’t even remember having spelling bees in school. (I know we had spelling contests, informally, in the classroom, but I don’t recall “events.”)
I would have done very, very, well.
Do they have Spelling Bees for adults? :dubious:
“Bureaucracy.” It’s amazing how getting it wrong in public fixes it in the mind, isn’t it?
Eighth grade. Philadelphia Bulletin spelling bee regionals. (And if you never even heard of the now-defunct Bulletin, that’ll give you an idea of how long ago that was!)
My parents weren’t gin drinkers, so I simply had no way of knowing that “rickey” isn’t spelled R-I-Q-U-E.
(I still have no clue why that seemed like a logical guess to me, though. Maybe I was thinking of “risque”?)
Seventh place.
I did get a nice dictionary as a consolation prize, though, with a sticker in the front with my name and everything. 
I still use that dictionary, falling apart though it is.
Why do spelling-bee knockouts stick with us so long? I couldn’t for the life of me remember details about the shots I missed on the basketball team or the track tournament where I came in last or my low test score in freshman calculus.
But my knockout word in the big spelling bee is like my major bicycle crashes—I’ll remember it forever. I still wince a bit when I see it in print.
I guess it’s because you’re up there by yourself, so it’s public as well as vulnerable. I actually don’t remember the word I missed in the Long Island finals in sixth grade (I thought it was picayune for a long time, but I saw a video a while back and found that wasn’t it). I remember I blew “aorta” in fifth grade.
^5 Kimstu I took first place in 7th grade at my school, and the Merriam-Webster dictionary, courtesy of the Bulletin, is like yours, quite shopworn but still lives within reach of my desk.
R E V O L U T I O N A R Y
Not, “E R Y”
sigh.
If anybody still cares, there’s not going to be a lawsuit.
This is why people shoot editors…
Now they’ve made the invalid presumption that the adults can and will read the rules beforehand. The parents of the next poor little Woofy Putzington are going to rattle the litigation saber faster than you can say, “Told ya so.”