I used to play Scrabble occasionally with a friend of mine and he would get (mock) outraged whenever I used a clearly foreign word that happened to be in the Scrabble dictionary like AVION (the English word for a French airplane) or REQUIN (the English word for a French shark).
So it’s just a test of reasoning skills, to be able to dope out the meaning and spelling of a word from its components? Good luck with that. English seems like one of the poorer languages in the world in which to expect that. Learning all the Latin and Greek prefixes and suffixes is a good start, but you can only go so far with that. Could you have doped out the spelling of genealogy that way?
That would work much better in Hebrew, I suspect.
Anyway, these little kids (and let’s note the prevalence of *little brown Indian kids here – the relevance of which will become apparent soon) could put that same reasoning power to much better use learning algebra, calculus, differential equations, etc. Why don’t we have algebra, trig, calculus, and DiffEq bees for first graders? Now that would be impressive and meaningful!
We just can’t risk that all those little brown kids might study up on their differential equations aboard an airplane enroute to the city of the Mathing Bee of course. Okay, scratch that idea.
I think I’d be outraged too. Why should avion and requin be thought of as English words for specifically French things? If we only used tsunami to mean a big wave when it hits Japan, I wouldn’t have called that English either. What about tiburón? Is that English too now, if requin is? (I never saw or heard the word “requin” before.)
Spelling bees in the US long pre-date the prevalence of “little brown kids” participating and winning. At least, I think they do.
And there are math competitions and such for little kids, too. Just not as widely done. I know my Indian co-workers kids are on teams that do that sort of thing. I admit, I’m not sure about competing at the individual level. Don’t know what the biggest/highest level awards for those are. They do have the science-fair type of thing (STEM fair?), too. Co-worker’s kid won (placed in?) one of those, I think, and got to spend some time at MIT working on a project of some sort (presumably one there specifically for high school kids).
In some (quite extensive) areas of the United States, Spanish is now becoming heavily blended with English, to such an extent that we now call it Spanglish. (This blending involves grammar as well as vocabulary.) A great many Spanish words are now well known, at least in these parts of the country. How much of the Spanish vocabulary is now considered part of English and eligible to be used in the Scripps Spelling Bee?
Hey, if little kids of age 6 through 10 are mastering algebra, trig, calculus, and differential equations to the extent that we’re having massive Scripps Math Bees on it, great! Much more meaningful, useful, and impressive than learning all those obscure vocabulary words (even if we do stick with just English).
Just remember: No brushing up on your math aboard an airplane while brown!
BTW: Who are these Scripps folks who put on this Spelling Bee? The only Scripps I know of is an oceanographic research facility near San Diego.
Actually, the bee is more than about memorizing words; it is about analyzing roots and figuring spelling based on foreign rules, or conventions of transliteration. Which is actually the crux of English spelling. So the bee is not so far off. If you understand that analyzing the roots of words will help you spell them correctly, then English spelling does not seem so random. English, especially American English, is a mixed language; as a previous poster said, a foreign word is just one English had not found found a use for, yet.
Thanks. Multiple items of ignorance fought! (ETA: Re: Info about Scripps.)
One of those WaPo articles mentions that:
From here (not the same link given in the WaPo article), we see that the above isn’t spelled right. It’s supposed to have only one p in …sesquipedal… not two. Allegedly the extra p was stuck in just to make the word longer than it already is.
I can get this much more for analyzing unfamiliar words to grok their meaning. Spelling is much too quixotic in English – it’s one of the fact of English life that is most often criticized about the language, even on this very board! (Example: “genealogy”, which I mentioned above. We needn’t even get started with anomalies like “colonel”.)
OTOH, it’s definitely a useful skill to figure out the meanings of words by recognizing their parts. I, for example, immediately understood the word coprolite the first time I heard it! :eek: (In an introductory anthropology class.)
And even here on this board, we see people using on-the-spot invented neologisms (Leo Bloom, are you with us?) that are immediately understandable. We literate people do that!
Anyway, I see that this conversation is active right now, but I need to duck out for a few hours to deal with – things. Back later or tomorrow!
This is dumb and arbitrary. Your point seems to be that anime is not English because it’s the name of a Japanese style of animation. So is ballet English? What about taco, or hijab or crescendo? If an Australian starts making cartoons in the anime style, does it then become an English word? Who decides?
Of all the things to point and laugh at America about (and there are plenty) I think the fact that the country goes a little nuts once a year for a contest of kids’ intellectual abilities and actually broadcasts this on a national sports channel is pretty fucking cool. (And there are competitors from lots of other countries now.)
After watching this kid I had the mixed respect one gives to someone who memorizes the phone book.
The non-televised rounds, which eliminate about 80% of the spellers, emphasize vocabulary and word usage in addition to just memorizing spelling words. The links will show you more.
http://spellingbee.com/public/results/2016/round_results
I also did not see any spellers who were morbidly obese, or even anything beyond slightly pre-pubertal chubby, and not very many people like that in the audience either. 
There was a 6-year-old girl in the Bee a few years ago. Makes me wonder what kind of parents some of these kids have, too. A while back, there was, over a decade or so, a family of 5 or 6 kids who all made it to the finals, although none of them won. After the youngest one turned 18, the kids, who had all been homeschooled at a time where that was very uncommon, all came forward to say that their father had taught them spelling words and not much else, and told all of them almost from the time they could understand that they had to go to the National Spelling Bee or he would kill them - and they believed he would have, too. :eek: :mad: I’ll see if I can find a link.
On a happier note, did anyone see the interview with the boy who made it to the finals, and his grandfather, who participated in 1955? 
That was a neat story.
BTW, I started this thread a few days ago. Someone else addressed it being on ESPN; it’s been aired on that network for probably 20 years if not longer, and one of the major networks aired the finals for a few years but stopped because of low ratings after the first screening.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=793687
Most of the stories about that homeschooled family seem to be from ultra-right-wing websites, and I seem to have gotten a few facts wrong but here’s one story that’s not from a RWNJ site.
It’s the name of an American town, so why not?
Not true. Knowing, for example, that “judo” is Japanese and not French gets you a long way to spelling it right, just like knowing that “filet” is French gets you most of the way to spelling it correctly. And even for words that have been in the language much longer, there are still rules that are derived from their language of origin. The B in “debt” has never been pronounced. It is there because Samuel Johnson thought it should be there to remind people it was from the Latin word “debitum.” It actually had commonly been spelled “det” or “dette” (English acquired it from Latin via French) before Johnson.
Noah Webster tried to simplify things with his phonetic spellings, but they were just the spellings of his particular dialect, and don’t help us much now. Sometimes they make it harder to see the original word behind the adaptation.
It’s in the Bear Flag Republic, not America. Do they speak English there? 
(And the city of Tiburon spells it wrong anyway – no accent over the o.)
Some snippets from nearwildheaven’s other thread:
So there really is a Math Bee? Now, that seems like something worth making a big deal of. Who sponsors it? How advanced is the math that these little kids do? Are we talking about anything like algebra and beyond? I’ll bet they don’t just memorize long lists of obscure integration formulas.
And Geography is a useful subject to know about too, beyond just memorizing place names and locations. Who sponsors that? National Geographic I’d guess?
But memorizing lots of obscure words? (Or even doping out the spellings using reason, logic, and Greek/Latin prefixes?) To make a nationwide spelling contest over?
Uh, yeah. What Little_Pig wrote a few posts above: