G-U-E-R-D-O-N

Congratulations to Sameer Mishra for winning the National Spelling Bee. .

Every year they televise this, I say, "I'm going to sit down and watch" but I never do.

I think part of it was that I was a spelling bee kid myself - I only got as far as the regionals (and didn't go very far at that) - and I remember that horrible, heart-pounding, sweaty-palmed moment that you stand at the microphone, waiting for your word.

Is it going to be one you know in a snap? Is it going to be one you studied? Is it going to be one you can visualize perfectly in your mind and get all the letters in the right order, no problem? Or is it going to be one of THOSE words, the ones with the funny vowel combinations, or with the funky not-from-any-Indo-European-language diphthong that you always screw up?

Or, worst of all, is it going to be a word you've never even heard of before?

So I think part of the reason I don't watch is that my stomach tends to knot up in sympathy for the kids.

But I have watched a bit of the news coverage - noted the words used. And the winning word, if I may boast a bit, is not completely unfamiliar to me - I am sure I've seen it in some of my books dealing with Ancient Rome. (It means something like a prize that a person has earned).

There was one bit of a news clip that I saw that just made me chuckle. Mishra was up for his turn, the "pronouncer" told him the word.

The word was "Numnah," which is some kind of sheepskin product (I had to look it up myself and I couldn't remember the correct spelling without looking at the AP story)

Confusion crossed the young boy's face.

"Numbnut?" he asked.

The pronouncer, not wanting to risk violating the rules, couldn't just say, "No, that's not it." So he said instead, gently, "How about I say it again and you say it after me?"

And then he pronounced it more clearly.

And the look of relief that suffused Sameer's face, when he realized what the word really was (and presumably, he knew how to spell it) was priceless. (I can imagine he was thinking something like, "Wow....that was almost the most epic of epic fails ever." Can you imagine how awful it would be to be the kid who lost the national spelling bee because you thought your word was "numbnut"?)

I have to admit that I kind of love the spelling bee kids. It gets back to the fact that I always appreciate it when someone has that passion, that interest - when they will spend large amounts of time doing a thing mostly for its own sake. I know there are people who would argue (because I've had some in my classes) that spelling in these days of Spell-Check is unimportant, that you should just slap any old spelling down there and let the computer correct it. Or, more insidiously, there are the "language evolves, dammit!" people who sometimes argue that any spelling that people can interpret should be regarded as a "correct" spelling. (Some of these are the same people who would like to make text-speech acceptable for all written communications).

And to that I say no. There is a certain amount of pride, I think, that one can take in doing things RIGHT. In going to the effort to make sure everything is correct. In not being sloppy. (I think I said before that one of the things that irritates me is intellectual laziness - ESPECIALLY coming from people who should know better).

I know there are also people who would argue that being a good speller is kind of a useless skill - that it is not something that will pave the way to a good job, or to fame or glory or anything like that. That it's not like being, say, an excellent hockey player.

And yet - I think there is a certain value to it. It shows that these kids have the ability to focus. That they have discipline - discipline to sit indoors and look at lists of roots and suffixes and prefixes when other kids are out playing. That they care about something and will take the time to learn it and to be excellent at it.

There was an author - I think it was Mark Bauerlein- who was talking on some radio show about how the claims some people make that "The Internet is our collective memory now" (in the sense that learning and education should be "transformed" and changed into something happy and fun where there is never any drilling on times-tables or state capitols or things like that) are false, that having a superficial knowledge of something (or assuming you can look it up on Wikipedia) is very different from KNOWING something, from taking a lot of time with it, from looking at it from a lot of different angles. He used the example of Abraham Lincoln. "Internet era" knowledge, he suggested, would give you the dates that Lincoln served in office and maybe the text of his speeches, or pieces of legislation he passed. But someone who STUDIED Lincoln, who tried to fit him into the larger American picture, who looked at his character, the things he did before he got into office - they would have a much more complete view and in some sense, their characters would be built by learning about the characters of the people they studied. (He said it a lot better than I can).

And I guess that's part of it for me. I am always cheered when someone cares so deeply about a topic that they want to look at it from all sides - they want to LIVE that topic, they want to be able to talk intelligently about it at length.

That may be because that's how I tend to learn about things - when something grabs my interest, I want to read all that I can about it, look at the pros and cons, try to figure out how and why it is important to the other things I know.

And prepping for the spelling bee is kind of like that. I have a little first-hand information - as I said, I was a spelling-bee kid (only for two years, though, 7th and 8th grade) and I didn't get all that far.

I don't remember particularly how people were chosen - it may have been that we had a school spelling bee (with no beforehand preparation) but I kind of remember it as being that we were recommended by our "Language Arts" teachers. (Yeah, "Language Arts." Not "English" or "Grammar" or "Literature.")

Anyway. Those of us who were chosen, and who chose to do the spelling bee thing, would stay after school one or two days a week to train. I still remember my "coach" - she was also my 7th grade math teacher, Mrs. Turnblacer.

We would sit in her classroom and go over long lists of words. She'd talk to us about the various roots (Latin and Greek) that many words had, and talk of prefixes and suffixes. We also had "homework" - lists of words to familiarize ourselves with.

In some cases, you can break a word down by its component parts and get the spelling that way. But a lot of words - especially words brought in from non-Indo-European languages, especially words that have had to have been transliterated from something like Hebrew or Sanskrit - you can't do that. You just have to learn them. So learn them we did.

I wonder now if that was part of what lead to my having an "enhanced" vocabulary - in that I am the person that people ask, "Hey, what does this word mean?" (And I almost always know it). Then again - I always loved the vocabulary-building and spelling (which tended to be "hard" words and so was more vocabulary-building) exercises in school. And I read a lot. And my mom claims that I used to read the dictionary when I was a kid, though I don't remember that.

At any rate - I enjoyed doing the spelling bee prep. I actually enjoyed the study sessions more than the actual bee, which was pretty nerve-wracking. I think I liked learning all those words because it was orderly, it was precise, it was something that required careful detail work, and I was good at that.

I think I also liked it because - as a non-athletic kid, as someone who wasn't all that good at art, who didn't sing - it was one way of my being able to be recognized for something I was good at. It didn't matter that the other kids thought it was dorky; it was important to me.

I'm not quite as careful about spelling as I used to be - there are certain words I always have to look up these days, and certain words I often misspell. But I do think there was some sort of intellectual or character-building value in having been in the spelling bee, of having taken the time to prepare and study for it. If nothing else, it emphasized my belief (instilled by my parents) that working hard at something is the best way to get what you want in life. (And no, I don't mind that I never got to go to the National bee. I don't know how well I would have handled it; I was a pretty tightly-wound kid and the regional bee was about all the stress I could take).