I once won a bracha bee. I beat out a bunch of Orthodox kids in black suits, kippot and tzitzis. Any love for me?
Basically, they asked us what’s the blessing over ________? and we had to say the right one, in Hebrew. So we had to know all the brachot, plus all the occasions for using them. I beat one kid by knowing that some potato chip or French fry product wasn’t “from the earth,” because it was either made from batter, or coated in flour, so it was “mezonot.” I won because I knew my junk foods as well as my blessings, while the Orthodox kids had never eaten anything their mothers hadn’t cooked, and the other non-Orthodox kids didn’t know all the blessings. Still, I won.
The National Geographic Bee final was held on May 25, 2016. It was broadcast on the National Geographic Channel on May 27. It will be rebroadcast on many PBS stations this coming week. (My local PBS station will broadcast it Monday and Tuesday.)
And just as an aside: They have destroyed the PBS web site. It’s nothing but those big iPhone-friendly blocks with infinite scrolling. You can’t find a damn thing there.
The reality is that the state or national level of any competition is going to involve hyper-specialization of a skill set well beyond any external utility. This is as true of academic contests, sports contests, pretty much everything. The existence of the contest encourages many, many people to develop useful and interesting skills, but the selection process means that eventually the top ranks will be dominated by people who dedicated a disproportionate amount of time to a narrow skill set.
It’s also true that there are tons and tons of academic competitions out there. Competitive robotics leagues, Academic Decathlon, speech and debate, DI, Model UN . . .the list goes on and on. Most lack a spectator component, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t a big deal. They just don’t get televised. In Texas, we have UIL Academic Competitions starting in elementary school and going through high school. They cover everything from accounting to mental math to computer science to essay writing to current events. And they are insanely competitive at the highest levels.
Finally, English spelling rules are vast and complex and there are tons of exceptions, but there are also tons of patterns and guidelines based on etymology. You can learn them and it profoundly changes how you see language because you start to see how words connect and evolve. Is it a set of knowledge worth learning, given the opportunity costs? Probably not for everyone, but it’s still a real thing and pretty cool. Spelling Bee kids don’t just memorize thousands of arbitrary letter sequences.
Applying my birdwatching background to the issue, I can see how those words lcan become “English”, if the words describe something in a non-English speaking country which an English speaker may wish to talk about, but no English word exists. For example, there is a species of bird native to Hawaii, called “'o’o” in the Hawaiian language, and of course, it is also an o’o in English, for there is no other way to reference it in English… Since there are many thousands of species of birds in the world which do not have an “English” name, they are simply called by the local vernacular, by traveling English-speaking birders who encounter them in the field abroad, and talk about them at home to each other.
As an exotic bird becomes commonly talked about in English discourse, it may cross the threshold of inclusion in an English dictionary, which has happened to many birds like the drongo, the hoopoe, and the kookaburra. Who is to decide where to put the line between bird names that are English and those that are not? They are simply all English words, if they can be talked about in English and no more appropriate English alternative exists.
I now officially hate Samuel Johnson :mad:. Would the Hebrew blessing for “people who complicate spelling just because” be along the lines of “may G-d bless and keep this people… far away from us”?
Some do. For some, memorization is a small part. Again, at the highest levels, ALL are going to involve skills mastered/things memorized beyond practical use. This is true in sports and band and chess and everything else as well. It’s the nature of a competition that has thousands and thousands of competitors. The strongest are obsessive. Only way to stop that is to stop competitions at say, city level. But then all the mid level competitors don’t do nearly so well or learn so much because the level of olay is just lower. No one ever even discovers what is possible.
There is a smallish number of such difficult and obscure words in English dictionaries, and a list of them exists as a practice list for spelling bee competitors. There might be a few hundred of them, and the participants have all seen the list and practiced from it. It is well within the mental capacity of an exceptional person to memorize the list. The reason they quit after 25 rounds and declare co-champions every year now, is because the list of usable words has been exhausted and there are several kids who have familiarized themselves with all of them, so no point in going on. Rarely is any bee competitor surprised by any word offered by the pronouncer.
Similarly, there are Scrabble lists of all accepted Scrabble words. I can’f find a link to it, but IIRC, there was a Korean who won the Scrabble championship a couple of decades ago who could not speak nor understand English, but simply memorized all permissible words in the Scrabble dictionary. A person who possesses this kind of memory and is driven to exercise it is not necessarily remarkable in any other mental capacity.
It was originally the Scripps-Howard Spelling Bee, as it was sponsored by the Scripps-Howard newspaper group. A few years ago, Scripps-Howard became Scripps Newspapers. It used to be that each participant represented a newspaper, and, in fact, a number of contestants this year still do (one represents the Sacramento Bee, for example).
If they were easy to spell it’d take the rest of your life. Competitors would only start being eliminated after 48 straight hours when they started misspeaking out of sheer exhaustion or losing on purpose to make the agony stop. There are no common or semi-unusual English words I could not spell at that age, not a single one, and any kid you see in the bee (and millions more) will get them all, too. If you DON’T pull out the obscure words, it would never end.
[QUOTE=Miller]
It’s the name of an American town, so why not?
[/QUOTE]
Proper names are not “words” in the sense that is meant in a spelling bee.
Not really. They think they do, but they can’t tell the difference between Don and Dawn and don’t realize that Mary, marry, and merry are supposed to be pronounced differently.
I got dinged on “justification” at the city level. I left out one of the "i"s in the middle. :smack:
When we had practice rounds for the school bee, we had a word pronounced “care-a-tee” and after several kids got it wrong, someone asked for the definition, and the teacher said, “Having the characteristics of a carrot.” That time, the speller got it right.
Anyone could participate, and there were kids who showed up for the practice rounds who were from the special ed class and could barely spell their names, and they would get some easy word wrong and say, “I’m stupid! I don’t know anything” and we would say, “No, you aren’t. You tried.” I’m glad that level of respect remains.
