Whilst channel surfing tonight, I stumbled across ABC's live broadcast of the Scripps Spelling Bee.
It was down to two girls, a girl named Katherine Close, from New Jersey, and a girl from Canada, whose name I never caught. Or maybe I did, but it wasn't mainstream enough for me to remember.
The rules are such that if you miss your word, not only must the remaining participant spell her word correctly, but she must then spell the word in the next round correctly.
In round 18, the Canadian girl was given the word, Welschmertz, which basically means "ironic pessimism," and is German in origin.
Okay, I've never heard of the damned word before, nor would I probably have gotten the spelling completely correct, but I definitely wouldn't have spelled it Velschmertz.
Because after saying the word over and over, asking a zillion times to have it repeated, and some furious hand scribbling, that's how she spelled it.
Even I know that in German, words that start with w are often pronounced v. Vagner didn't write the Ring Cycle. The Veimar days never happened.
Then Katharine Close got her two words correct, the last being Ursprache, which is "protolanguage: a language that is the recorded or hypothetical ancestor of another language or group of languages." Ursprache is also clearly Germanic in origin.
Go teen USA!
As an aside, I would also like to point out that kundalini is a pretty pussy word to have in a spelling bee. Yoga's pretty fucking popular these days, and that there's yoga terminology.
It was down to two girls, a girl named Katherine Close, from New Jersey, and a girl from Canada, whose name I never caught. Or maybe I did, but it wasn't mainstream enough for me to remember.
The rules are such that if you miss your word, not only must the remaining participant spell her word correctly, but she must then spell the word in the next round correctly.
In round 18, the Canadian girl was given the word, Welschmertz, which basically means "ironic pessimism," and is German in origin.
Okay, I've never heard of the damned word before, nor would I probably have gotten the spelling completely correct, but I definitely wouldn't have spelled it Velschmertz.
Because after saying the word over and over, asking a zillion times to have it repeated, and some furious hand scribbling, that's how she spelled it.
Even I know that in German, words that start with w are often pronounced v. Vagner didn't write the Ring Cycle. The Veimar days never happened.
Then Katharine Close got her two words correct, the last being Ursprache, which is "protolanguage: a language that is the recorded or hypothetical ancestor of another language or group of languages." Ursprache is also clearly Germanic in origin.
Go teen USA!
As an aside, I would also like to point out that kundalini is a pretty pussy word to have in a spelling bee. Yoga's pretty fucking popular these days, and that there's yoga terminology.
1 comment:
Runner-up was Finola Mei Hwa Hackett, a 14-year-old Canadian, a confident speller during two days of competition who nonetheless stumbled on "weltschmerz." The word means a type of mental depression.
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