Watched the final championship round of the National Spelling Bee last night, and the crowning of a new champion, 14 year-old Anamika Veeramani of Cleveland, Ohio. It had all the nail-biting suspense of a Hitchcock thriller. For those who missed out on the drama from last night's prime-time finale, you could rent one of the best documentaries I've ever seen, the Oscar-nominated Spellbound, which chronicled the
experience of 8 participants in the 1999
National Bee. (It's a little ironic that the National Bee is getting so much attention now, at a time when the budgets of schools and public libraries are being decimated.)
I was surprised and disappointed to learn that there were protesters at the event. But then I leaned
that they were dressed up as bees--with signs saying things like "Enough is Enuf"--and were actually engaged in a pretty sophisticated argument for reform of the English language. Two clear steps toward reform that they suggest--ending the use of the silent e, and the weird 'i before e except after c' rule. As this article explains, the "National Spelling Bee highlights what a mess English spelling is--a hodgepodge
of orthographies borrowed from German, French, Greek and Latin. Is it time for a makeover?"
The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw is said to have joked that the word "fish" could legitimately be spelled "ghoti," by using the "gh" sound from "enough," the "o" sound from "women", and the "ti" sound from "action."
The curiosities of English were fully on display last night, as every participant asked for the etymology of every word. Some words have a long and winding road, beginning, for example, as Latin, on to Greek, and then French before becoming part of the English language.
Here's the trailer for Spellbound:
