The Scripps National Spelling Bee is on. I watch it most every year. I was a competetive speller myself for awhile, and went to state once, but never took it seriously enough to ever work at or study for so I got wiped out at state. I still enjoy watching the SNSB, though, for the geek-a-thon that it is.
There are a couple of things that annoy me about it, though. It drives me nuts when the kids have to milk every possible question multiple times, stalling for time. “Are there any alternate pronunciations? Can I have an alternate sentence? Can I hear the pronunciation again, please? Can I have the language of origin? Does it contain the Greek root,'echino, meaning “spiny?” Can I hear the pronunciation again? Can I have the definition again, please?”
Just spell the fucking words, you little poindexters.
Also, you all need to stop doing that writing on the hand thing. When the first kid did it a few years ago, it was a genuine, dorkazoid, Asperger’s geekwad tic. Now it’s just an affect. Find your own tic. Slap yourself, or hop on one foot or something. Be original.
I think I’m going to root for the hulking, long-haired blonde kid who looks like a college sophomore already. He looks like the kind of kid I would have smoked pot and played D&D with in high school.
I wonder how many former competitive spellers we have on the SDMB. I went to the Colorado-Wyoming competition (feeder for the S-H nationals) in 1988-89, but only came in 11th.
You are probably not the only one, but I think most students could do with more intensive spelling and language study, not less. The quality of writing and spelling I see on a daily basis (in my small-medium IT company) is truly appalling, and I am sure I am not alone on this board in thinking that.
As a note, I wasn’t forced into spelling by my parents, or anyone else. I actually took a school-sponsored class in 7th and 8th grade called “Semantics” that taught spelling, etymology, etc. The class culminated in participating in spelling bees, but the emphasis was on having a comprehensive mastery of words. Sort of a mega-vocabulary class.
I think there are some kids who are pressured into it by their parents, over-coached, over-worked, and are more or less coerced into making it way too much of a priority in their lives, but the same is true for any other competitive activity that kids get into. Kids’ sports is rotten with parents like that.
Heh. I drove myself nuts at my school district’s finals in 8th grade. (On my winning word, no less.) In 5th grade, I’d missed on a word I knew but didn’t recognize but actually did know how to spell, so I wasn’t going to let that happen again. My problem was that once you ask for a definition, they’re going to read the whole definition, whether you want them to or not.
“For the championship: your word is, ‘kwee-rass’.”
“Um, can you use that in a sentence?”
“The museum had an ancient ‘kwee-rass’ on display.”
“Definition, please?”
(What seemed like five minutes of hunting through an unabridged dictionary.)
“'A breastplate of steel or leather …”
“OH! Okay, it’s …”
“I need to finish the definition.”
Well, fuck me, but why? I’m the only one who wanted the goddamn definition, and my only problem was that I’d never heard ‘cuirass’ pronounced. Bastards made me sit fidgeting through the whole dictionary entry.
Ayup. Thank God for Gary Gygax, that’s all I had to say after that.
