Been arguing with “Off My Lawn” guys (most of whom were making fun of the foreign surnames of most of the finalists ) all night lamenting that giving out eight “first place” trophies to the final 8 Spelling bee finalists is an example of too many “participation trophies”.
The fact is from what I can gather is they were running out of words and the competition basically broke down into a stalemate. This is not the first time there have been co-champions and it seems a trend.
I’m not anti-Participation trophy Guy but is there a way to break stalemates like this in the future? There are 171,000+ words in Websters. Are the organizers truly using all the possible words? How about a tie breaker? What about adding the 47,000 + obsolete words as a tiebreaker?
Open for ideas: how do we get to ONE spelling bee champ next year? Or is it impossible?
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Having 8 winners seems to m to be the natural evolution of the contest in that competitors just generally get better at stuff (as a whole). You may not see 8 next year but I’d wager on 2 or 3. I dont have a problem with it inherently, but it is less fun as a viewer, at least for me.
As far as getting it down to 1 winner, I think you need kind of a drastic change. If this were Canada I’d say adding French words as it’s our other national language, but the US doesn’t have one yet, does it?
A few quick thoughts:
-drastically decrease time to answer
-I wouldn’t say limiting questions as someone with hearing issues
-don’t decrease time, but once you run out of words the winner is determined by total time taken to answer (determined by when you start your final spelling) and a tally is kept throughout to make it interesting. You would need to give a prize to those who finished all their words, just a bigger one to the overall winner.
I think it’s the result of the binary nature of the event. You either spell the word correctly or you don’t. And if you spell it correctly, you can’t spell it better than somebody else.
Competitors at this level can reach the point of perfection; they’re going to be able to spell word after word without a mistake.
Time limits for sure. Start from 30 seconds, almost like a shot clock. After one round, drop to 25 seconds. Then 20. Eventually minimum would be 15 seconds.
From my understanding of it these kids are given massive lists of these words ahead of time to study. So while it is impressive that they can commit so much information to memory and recall it on demand there is still the fact that they have had an opportunity to see these words beforehand.
It would be interesting in the late rounds to allow the competition to stray from the pre-produced lists and see if the kids can use their knowledge of word origin, sentence use, etc. to spell a word they have never seen before.
You can absolutely get down to one winner, but it is increasingly going to need to be through some process other than “Can you spell a word on the official list?”
That is, you can see which of two contestants can say the letters more quickly, or see whether the contestants can define the word in addition to spelling it, or make them spell it while riding a unicycle (getting points for style), or show them the letters of a scrambled word and see if they can unscramble them to form an accepted word…but none of these are really testing the ability to spell a word.
In a sense, the game “Spelling Bee” has been solved. It’s now possible for kids to memorize so many spellings (and to be fair, so many spelling patterns) that the odds of the very best encountering a word they can’t spell in 20 rounds, or 40 rounds, or 100 rounds have become quite small. No, it’s not like a tic-tac-toe tournament, or even a Connect Four tournament, but it’s moving in that direction.
The “Get Off My Lawn” folks might be asked to spell any of the words used in the last several rounds this year, and then compare with some of the winning words from earlier bees–a list which includes initials, therapy, catamaran, and brethren, among others. It won’t help, of course, but it does make the point.
Well, on any sensible metric of spelling words in normal usage, all these participants are perfect. In fact, it’s gone beyond that - they are perfect at memorizing huge lists of obscure words with a tenuous claim to be part of the English language.
So if we want to anoint a champion, it must be on the basis that this person will not really be the sole champion of just spelling real English words - they will be the champion of some other intellectual feat that we choose.
If we want to make this about something important to language rather than just a party trick like speed-spelling, how about the contestant states the etymology of the word - Latin and Greek roots, etc.? It would require a bit more effort to judge the quality of the answers fairly, I guess.
I don’t know if they’ve seen it, and I can’t imagine how you would KEEP them from seeing words, since dictionaries are around.
But a lot of those kids seemed to be using their knowledge of word origin etc. to spell words they were clearly not entirely sure of.
I would agree with the time thing. Once you hit a certain round, tally up how long it’s taken, per letter (because obviously it’s gonna be quicker to spell “psoas” than it is to spell “bougainvillea”) and the winner is the one with the shortest average time per letter.
ETA: I would start throwing celebrity names at them. For starters, Katharine Hepburn, Dyan Cannon, and Barbra Streisand.
One news story I listened to pointed out that all of these contestants had personal trainers that grilled them continuously up until the competition. I don’t think the kids are getting better, I think that the preparation is just getting more sophisticated.
Either disallow that kind of preparation or make it difficult/impossible. Don’t give a full list ahead of time, perhaps.
As I said there, the top eight people today are far better than the top one person when the contest began. In the 1920’s, the winning words were gladiolus, cerise, abrogate, knack, and luxuriance. This year the eight winning words were auslaut, erysipelas, bougainvillea, aiguillette, pendeloque, palama, cernuous, and odylic. This has nothing to do with participation trophies. The problem is that the participants today are so much better than they were in the early years that it already requires using incredibly obscure words to distinguish them.
Litttle Nemo basically sank this is one. The structure of the competition, as it currently stands, is flawed, and was inevitably going to result in this.
Several posters have already mentioned a severe time limit; that would certainly allow for a single winner to be crowned, and would significantly change the nature of the competition.
It seems to me that the solution is to run things in parallel, in some fashion or other. Run multiple stages at once, or have several kids at once spelling each word on paper, or give each kid their word while the kid before them is still up at the microphone. Using the same word for multiple contestants makes it less likely that the list will run out (and seems more fair), and reducing the time per word means that you can ask each contestant more words total.
The words used in the National Spelling Bee are all taken from Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. There are 472,000 words in this dictionary. Where are they going to get more words? Any word not in that dictionary is so rare that it’s very dicey to even say that it’s in the English language.
Running multiple stages in parallel changes the basic structure of a spelling bee. The point is that any viewer can see live everything going on in the bee. I don’t think that they would want to change the structure in that way.
I thought the only list that the competitors saw in advance was for only the first round.
My thought as well - at some point, read out the word, alternate pronunciations, definition, origin, and usage in a sentence, and have all of the competitors write down the answer. The National Geographic Bee doesn’t seem to have a problem with a “same questions for everybody” method.
Another change they need to consider; get rid of the live broadcast. I have a feeling the real problem was, whoever (ABC? ESPN?) was airing it wanted to be able to show “the winner” on the broadcast without extending it or continuing the next night (and another night also may not have been an option for some of the competitors).
Do you have some evidence that the limitation to the 472,000 words in the dictionary (whose name I gave above) only applies to the first round? I’ve checked a lot of online references and none of them say that. Where do you get the idea that later rounds can use other words? What words are those? Are you claiming that the judges can pick one word used in one English-language book in 1937 and declare that to be an English-language word?
