I like to watch this little slice of Americana, and after a few hours, when the finalists weren’t getting dinged the way the planners expected, they announced as midnight approached that anyone remaining at the end of round 20 would all be co-champions.
Eight tweens will all be awarded the grand prize package, which is $50,000 and some assorted other goodies. Whoever made the winner’s trophy will have to make 7 more of them, and the announcers said that they may have to revise some of the rules (again).
That was definitely something nobody was expecting.
That guy pronouncing the words is weird. “frawn-tee-air” for frontier? “Boo-gain VEAL-ia” for bougainvillea? Note, I pronounce this “boganvee-uh” but I will admit it could have alternate pronunciations. But what I said is also a pronunciation and he didn’t use that one. And something about Dionny-sauce. (Only one of these words was a competition word.)
I do think it’s strange, they have words I’ve never heard of, and I know a lot of words. I have proofread dictionaries. Words from the scientific realm, words used by Scandinavians to describe snowy fields. Frankly I have no idea if the pronouncer guy was getting those right.
And then they throw in easy, recognizable words like “meerschaum,” “Komondor,” “psoas,” and “bougainvillea.”
I was impressed as hell by the kids, though. They got most of those amazingly tricky words.
I never saw someone so excited about erysipelas, which used to be a fatal disease, until this evening.
The words are often not so much “big” as they are not in the vocabulary of most people. For example, I only knew about the psoas muscle because I injured mine many years ago and got sciatica as a result. Last year’s winning word was “koinonia”, which was a breeze for me because I went to a Methodist church when I was a kid, and they had an adult fellowship group with that name.
In 8th grade, I got to the city level and was dinged on “justification” because I missed one of the "I"s in the middle.
Stupid newspaper had a photo with the caption, “”…xxx after spelling his final word Wednesday…
Gave the impression his final word was “Wednesday”! Moreover, the freaking article never gave the winning word!
Couple of decades ago I had an absolutely freakish dork of a supervisor, whose claim to fame was having won the Nat’l Spelling Bee. If memory serves, his word was eczema.
I’ve always been quite a good speller. But only remember being in one “bee” in grade school. Can still remember being pissed about failing on the word “I” for not saying “Capital i”.
Are you sure that they each will get $50k? Normally in sporting events where a purse is involved if there is no decided winner and a tie, then they would split the winnings for 1st and second place.
So I would expect that whatever prizes there were for places 1 through 8 would be equally divided between the 8 of them.
It’s not like these organizations have unlimited budgets that they can come up with an extra $350,000 to give out.
Only if the U.N. were 7/8 of South Asian descent! I read this morning that the one “white” girl on the podium this year was the first non-South Asian winner at Scripps in like 11 or 12 years. A brief, not very conclusive explainer here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/us/spelling-bee-south-asians.html
EDIT: to be clear, while this is an odd situation, I have no problem with it or anything. But the spelling bee universe is not particularly ethnically diverse at the very top tier!
Huh. I’ve typically heard it with the “l” pronounced, and some dictionaries online don’t even list your pronunciation, but Youtube clips do show it is a common way of saying it. Learn something every day.
Why after all these years don’t they realize that EVERY kid is going to ask for definition, word origin, and sentence usage for EVERY word, and just provide all that immediately after the word is given to save time?
I heard something about RSVP but didn’t know what it was.
Great - they can buy their kids’ way into the Bee. What’s next? Good grief. :mad:
Several years ago, MAD magazine had a piece on the bee, and it included:
Introducing the kids with Chippendales and Hooters girls
Using the Indian kids’ names as spelling words
Just plain old making up words that don’t exist in any language
Using the words in really disturbing sentences (“Betsy became LACHRYMOSE when she saw her dog squashed on the side of the road.”)
There was one finalist I was kind of glad to see dinged because I just plain old didn’t like her. Dr. Bailly would give her a word, and SHE would define it. Good heavens. I don’t think he was too happy about that either, and she said that her wardrobe consisted mainly of bee motifs, many of them made by her mother (who I’ll grant was an expert seamstress).
Which is no longer just for Americans. The entrants also came from the Bahamas, Canada, Ghana, Jamaica, Japan and South Korea. I’m not talking about their ancestry. I’m talking about where they live now.
I don’t get it. Why? I’d be happy in an 8-way tie for first, with no split prize money or anything. I mean, win-win-win-win-win-win-win-win for everyone involved! Also takes the pressure off a bit. I mean, I’m pretty competetive, but I’d rather have first place with seven others and fifty Gs in my pocket than second place by my lonesome and 25.
Also, the competition is so intense now that 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: