Hey, I was a band geek and a spelling champ! Well, okay, I placed 2nd in my junior high and took 4th at the all-city spelling bee).
I would have taken 1st at my school, but for some reason the word I screwed up ended with the letter “e” and I said “y”. I knew damn well it should be “e” and tried to draw my “y” out into an “e” … “whyeeeeeeee!” … the judges weren’t going for it. Had I been a baseball fan at the time, I would have been a catcher trying to fool the umpire into thinking that “ball” was actually a “strike” by moving my glove.
But man, spelling. Misspelled words jump off the page and punch me in the nose. I can’t help seeing them.
Only team sports (soccer, cricket, rugby, hockey, baseball etc) are fun to watch. Individual sports (except lawn tennis) are all boring to watch, agree?
To me, spelling bees are like: “Our written language is so stupidly at odds with pronunciation that we’ll have a competition to see who can best overcome the stupidity of the language by memorizing a shit load of information”
It’s an event that highlights the shortcomings of the language.
Of course, I say this as someone who speaks some phonetic languages, where there is a (mostly) one-to-one correspondence between what you say and how you write it. I prefer it that way, but I can see that people who were raised only with English might have no problem whatsoever with the lack of one-to-one correspondence between what you say and how you write it in English.
A story from an American who moved to Italy:
His elementary school child was playing with her new friends in Rome. She proudly told her friend that she had won the spelling bee back in her original school in America.
The Italian kid asked “what’s a spelling bee”?
And when it was explained to her, she responded simply :
“Oh. We don’t have those here in Italy. We already know how to spell.”
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” – James D. Nicoll
Explain the lure of Jeopardy, or Wheel of Fortune, or Wipeout. It’s just a competition to see who’s the biggest smarty pants or whack-a-doodle. My local bar used to have a yearly spelling bee. It was fun watching drunks try to spell words like ‘anemone’. The prize was a $1000, so it did get quite serious at the end.
Those kids play for scholarships. As for why it’s televised? I guess they have to fill in the airtime somehow between the bowling, 9-ball and cricket matches.
I haven’t watched Wipeout, but if it’s like those other two shows, the lure is that you can play along at home. Wheel of Fortune is less intellectual and more pattern recognition, which is much closer to a spelling bee.
So that’s my answer to the OP. The competition might be less exciting than sports (since you aren’t really seeing the skills), but the ability to play along at home makes up for that.
Plus, it doesn’t take much to be on TV. How many people do you think find Wheel of Fortune to be even a great show? Yet it’s able to stay on the air and give out a lot of money, while still remaining profitable.
EDIT: I notice I neglected one thing: all game shows have vicariousness as part of the fun. Some shows, like Deal or No Deal only have that. And I think spelling bees do, too. Sports much less so–the feats you see them do are not close to things you can do, so it’s harder to identify with them, save maybe at championships where they get really emotional.
Actually - same thing in Germany.
Spelling is no big deal in German - every single letter is pronounced, and always the same way, and there are pretty much no “trick” spellings of words.
I am sure little kids might practice spelling words - but once you get the hang of it, it is pretty much impossible to misspell a German word.
I believe “Ursprache” was a winning word in one recently. Which really surprised me, since it just combines two well-known German words (by well-known I mean by those who don’t speak German fluently) - but then I think the loser may have spelled it with the “sch”…
Elimination competitions are extremely popular with viewers/spectators no matter what the subject matter is.
All the major sports have a playoff system where teams are eliminated till one is left standing. People absolutely love the NCAA basketball finals format while hating the format of college bowl games.
Reality TV has caught on and uses the same format of elimination. Survivor, Big Brother, Project Runway, The Bachelor, American Idol, Miss America.
Put any mundane task into an elimination format and somebody will watch it.
It’s kind of like watching Curling on the Olympics. It’s a fun diversion for a few hours since it’s on so rarely, but you wouldn’t watch it every night.
That’s why spelling bees seem particularly stupid to me. English is apparently one of the few languages of any importance where the notion of a spelling competition makes any sense - in pretty much every other alphabetic languages, spelling is straightforward and automatic. Meanwhile, I’m explaining to my 6 year old why ‘gh’ is sometimes pronounced with an ‘f’ sound, and sometimes not pronounced at all, but almost never pronounced in a way that has anything to do with the normal pronunciations of the letters ‘g’ and ‘h’.
So we’ve got this language with a built-in handicap, and we have competitions to see who can best overcome this handicap that we English-speakers have to waste a bunch of brain space on, rather than figuring out a way to simply do away with the freakin’ handicap.
A spelling bee is, in a way, a celebration of collective stupidity.
In French they have “dictées”, which are like spelling bees except that you have to transcribe an entire passage. This is because in French it is common for a single pronunciation to have many possible spellings, and you need context to know the correct one to use.
