Language of origin, please
Posted by Smitha | Filed under memories, personal, school, tv
My team was at Firehouse Subs for our weekly Friday lunch outing, and I was filling up my drink when I caught a snatch of some very familiar-sounding dialogue–a child’s voice, pronouncing a word and spelling it out with a peculiar clarity. My head jerked up and I looked around quickly, then looked up and realized there was a TV suspended over me. I took two steps back to peer around at the front, and sure enough, it was the Scripps National Spelling Bee!
I will admit that I’m a spelling bee fangirl. I love it. I miss the deep cadences of Dr. Cameron’s speaking voice, but have come to look forward to current pronouncer Dr. Bailly’s slightly higher-pitched voice as he reads out the hundreds of words to these brilliant kids. I love watching them as they work their way through each word, asking the requisite questions: Can I have the definition? Can you use it in a sentence? Can I have the language of origin? Or even, Does the ___ part of this word come from the root word ___ in Greek, which means ___? I clap for, cringe in sympathy for, and cheer on these kids yearly.
This isn’t a purely random interest. I won our county spelling bee in the 6th grade (“pagoda”, ironically, considering that I went on to spend two years of my life in Japan), losing narrowly in the district bee on “pacificism,” more commonly known as “pacifism”–the proctor screwed up the pronunciation, and I came in 3rd, with 1st and 2nd going on to the state bee (2nd place lost on “podunk” and 1st won on “disappoint”…yeah). I sometimes still wonder what Could Have Been. I will admit that it was a chore back then, and I didn’t have the drive needed to make it to the nationals, but now it’s an avid fascination.
It’s fascinating, the lengths these kids go to for this competition. And it goes beyond just stringing letters together–sometimes it’s a matter of chance, if you get a word you haven’t heard but think you can spell because you understand the spelling conventions it could be following due to its language of origin.
And there’s that dreaded sound that makes the entire audience slump back in their seats as one and sigh, “Aww…”: The Bell. The one that sounds when a speller’s made a spelling mistake. The kids’ faces are like open books–you can see how it all plays out, you can see what’s going through their minds, whether it was a near miss they anticipated, whether they waited in dread because they knew they’d messed up, or whether it was a total surprise.
Every single year it comes on, I think about signing up to go out to DC and volunteer for the following year. Every single year I forget. Maybe one of these years!
I have tentative plans tonight to go out to dinner with a meetup.com group here in Atlanta (a group whose events I’ve never attended, so it’s not like they’re expecting me), but I think I may ditch in favor of finding a friend with a TV so I can watch the two-hour finals live tonight.
