Tidbit, trivia, hijack:
When I first moved to Los Angeles many years ago, I worked as a temp between jobs.
One of my most interesting assignments was for the guy who had the broadcast rights to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, DC.
This guy had a huge house in the Hollywood Hills (my guess, worth $1 million dollars back then, but probably worth three times that now, if not more).
He was an idiot, but a rich idiot. He had, at the time, purchased the state-of-the-art computer, and quite literally, didn’t even know how to turn it on!
I worked for him for about a month. I taught him how to turn the computer on, how to open the software and how to write letters and…how to use spellcheck! He was worse than many of my ESL students in Europe!
He and his brother had cleverly bought the rights to the broadcast when it was almost ready to fold, I give them credit for having the guts to buy it, and the brother was fairly clever with marketing, so they were able to keep it afloat. I have no idea if they are still involved, or sold the rights.
The stories he told! One of the biggest problems was with parents who claimed their children spelled the word correctly but were misunderstood. Children’s voices are very difficult to understand sometimes, and he freely admitted that there were a (very) few cases where the parents might have been right - the kids did indeed spell it correctly, but mumbled, or corrected themselves, or were otherwise misinterpreted.
There was big money involved at that level.
However, to sue at the level as mentioned by Otto, well - I can only imagine what would have happened had the little darling had actually gone to Washington!
