News Item: The 2015 Scripps National Spelling Bee ends in a tie
Are we really supposed to pretend to be interested in this? This is a competition for nerds with no athletic ability whatsoever. Is it really a “competition” at all since there is no ball used whatsoever?
This year was particularly unspectacular as Vanya
Shivashankar and Gokul Venkatachalam, spelled like maniacs until they had exhausted
the championship word list. That’s right;
the dictionary ran out of words before they made an error.
And talk about boring. This is as boring as women’s
basketball. Nerd after nerd, spelling
word after stupid word. To spice things
up they should let the other contestants pelt the speller with dodgeballs if he
or she misspells the word.
This wrinkle would add more pressure to the contest and
make it much more enjoyable to watch. It
would also prepare them for real life like when you have to make a PowerPoint
presentation in front of a room of bastard executives just waiting for you to
make a mistake before they pounce.
Another issue is fairness and you must admit Shivashankar
and Venkatachalam have an unfair
advantage and we all know what it is:
Their names are too long. And
they have had to spell these humongous names correctly thousands of time over
their lives. If you have had that much practice spelling hard words, it’s no
surprise you can beat the dictionary. I
propose that no person be allowed to compete in next year’s bee if their name
scores more than 50 points on a scrabble board.
And the words used in this bee are horrendous. The last words spelled by the winners were:
Scherenschnitte - The art of cutting paper into
decorative designs
Nunatak - A hill or mountain completely surrounded by
glacial ice
These are completely bogus words. You would never use scherenschnitte because
you can’t pronounce it and nobody knows what it means if you did. And everyone knows the real definition of nunatak
is a riot at the convent. The contestant
from my region got eliminated by xenodochium — a medieval house for the care of
the
Squirrel scherenschnitte
poor. The word hasn’t been used for
centuries and let’s face it; it’s never coming back in vogue.
To force these kids to memorize thousands of irrelevant,
useless, words constitutes child abuse.
This is a huge waste of effort. The time would be much better spent
doing something useful such as playing video games or talking on your cell
phone. Or
Where nuns attack!
you could use the time to
practice in order to achieve something really significant – scoring a
touchdown. And gud spellin is vastlie uvarated, dun't ya knu?
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