The National Spelling Bee is this week in Washington, D.C. No MBers are in it this year as far as we know, but we still like it enough to give it its own thread.
The National Spelling Bee is this week in Washington, D.C. No MBers are in it this year as far as we know, but we still like it enough to give it its own thread.
Now. I stinnk at spelling.
I remember when Emma was in it…haven’t seen her on the blog for a while.
I came in 6th in regionals and sat in the audience spelling all the words correctly…I was bitter for quite a long time.
Spelling! Spelling! *geeks out so much*
Anyways, for those of you who’ve followed the bee in the past, the big news of the year is that there’s only one Canadian in the bee this year. No other big changes this year, though. (All rules are the same as last year.)
speller: I’ve heard that’s because they changed the rules to admit only the all-Canada champion, not each regional champion.
There’s also only one Jamaican this year, and I believe a speller from New Zealand.
That’s the change. I’m not sure if it was a rule change or if CanSpell, which sponsors all the Canada bees and is run by a group of Canadian papers, just wanted to pay for one speller… Either way, there’s only one.
Yeah, there’s always been one Jamaican and one from New Zealand. And I think one or two from somewhere in Asia…
Also, is the Society for Simplified Spelling (the protesters) there this year? If I recall correctly, they were there my 7th grade year but not my 8th grade year.
Do the Asians come from Singapore? That sounds right. I could check.
I remember the simplified-spelling protesters. I’ll stroll over and see whether they’re back this year.
It appears that there’s one from China and one from South Korea. And on e from Ghana too.
The bee is being live streamed, so I’ll be watching it for the next little while. If people want, I’ll post my commentary in a few hours.
Please do, speller! You’ll have unique insights.
(By the way, Cat Cojocaru is providing expert commentary for the “List of Things Thrown” blog.)
Cat! I remember her from both bees I was in. Very nice. Haven’t heard from her since the bee.
OK, having watched part of round three, I can tell you that the spellers have been given the words for both rounds two and three. They were either from the Spell It! (the booklet for regionals) or an extra 500 (I think) words that they were mailed when they won their regional bees. Anyone serious should know these.
So, easy words so far. That must mean that a “bloodbath” elimination round is coming up soon.
Well, these are the prelims, so if you misspell a word, you’re not necessarily out. Based on a combination of how they do with these words and the written test, at most 50 get selected for the semifinals tomorrow.
Ooh, cool! I remember watching the final last year on T.V. which is when I realized just how big a deal this is.
*is not very good at spelling*
I admire anyone able to participate in it and pie all the contestants!
(Also, one of the ways I found MB was when I saw emmatheduck’s letter in Muse awhile back when she was in the bee because she included the MB URL in her signature. I think she also had a picture with Robert!)
starr – I found MB, because Emma told me to come here when I was in the bee with her.
List of semifinalists is up. No huge surprises, honestly. Neither Kavya’s nor Jonathan Horton’s little sister made it, but Matt Evans’s sister (who was also in the bee last year, I think) did. Most of the 3 or 4 timers made it… No huge surprises as far as I know.
Matt Evans? I know a Matt Evans! Strange.
Ah! I immediately thought Matt Smith and Jonathan Strange when I saw that…ooh. Bad idea, nevermind.
On topic! Yes! When and on which network is this being aired! Question mark! Making that a question, yes, not a typo.
From their biographical statements, I’d say most of the 48 semifinalists would fit right in here on MuseBlog.
I’m happy to see that Owayne Rodney from Jamaica is still in, along with a lot of high-finishing spellers from last year. Laura Newcombe from Canada made it. So did Northern Virginia’s own Tim Ruiter, who looks as if he might be related to Emma Watson.
Pretty much all spellers would fit in on MuseBlog.
I’m leaving for a math competition any minute now, but I’m going to try to watch the finals there, and I’ll comment on them when I get back Saturday night.
Good luck, speller! May you win much glory!
I don’t know if it’s okay to say this on here, but I’ll just say that our school has historical done very well. Very well. Very well. We also have a semifinalist in my grade. Very well. I hope this won’t be snipped.
This morning I ran into a couple of simplified-spelling protesters outside the hotel, took their picture and chatted for a while. There were just two of them, a man and a woman, both retired, grandparental, and very nice. They stressed that they aren’t protesting the spelling bee or spellers, just the illogicality of English spelling. They like and respect the kids in the bee. The woman said she used to be a school principal in Northern Virginia but retired to Iowa. I was going to find out more, but a reporter from CanSpell strolled over and started asking questions, so I continued on to work.
Update:
At the end of Round 4, 11 of the 48 remaining spellers have been eliminated, including the kids from Jamaica and New Zealand, leaving 37 to proceed to Round 5.I spoke too soon. The round wasn’t over. Now it is, and 15 spellers are out, leaving 33 entering the fifth round. My Northern Virginia almost-neighbor Tim Ruiter, who finished second last year, was one of the last to fall, misspelling fustanella as fustinella. (Maybe the spellers in our midst had heard of the word “fustanella,” but I hadn’t.)
Now Round 5 is underway. Two of the first four spellers went down in flames. It looks as if it’s going to be a tough one.
Tough and sad. Sonia Schlesinger just spelled out. She came all the way from Tokyo, and today is her 14th birthday. Too bad. Six out of the first 16 are down…
Round six. Four out of the first five spellers have spelled out. Only the lone Canadian has escaped the slaughter.
Weirdness afoot at the bee. For speller73 and others who have been out of contact: they stopped Round 6 halfway through because too many contestants were spelling out. It’s not 100% clear, but it sounds as if they have declared all the remaining spellers in the round (who had not spelled yet) automatic finalists and sent them on to compete on TV tonight, along with the four spellers who had already survived the round.
If that is indeed what is happened, then it amounts to giving
half of thethe final six spellers in the round a free word and seems to me blatantly unfair. Maybe instead they’ll finish Round 6 on TV tonight. We’ll just have to wait and see.I’ve been following the bee when I get the chance, and that too seems blatantly unfair, finishing Round 6 tonight seems to be the only way around it. :/ Have they ever stopped a round in the middle before?
If I understand what the judge is saying, they’re (basically) going to “hide” the rest of Round 6 in the Finals. The winner, and the other prizewinners, will be determined by the total number of points, so nobody who skipped Round 6 can win without spelling an extra word in the Finals. But it still means that six of the “finalists” will have had to do less work to appear on TV.
It’s not totally unfair, but it’s not completely fair, either. And apparently over at the Bee, some of the spellers, including successful ones, are hopping mad about it, and they said so at the post-round press conference.
Injustice! They could just reschedule the finals for tomorrow, but they want money for it.
Meanwhile, here’s a picture of the spelling-reform protesters I met this morning. (Thanks to Lady Bunniful for preparing it for Photobucket.)
The man’s T-shirt says “i before e except after c. weird?” and the woman is wearing a bee costume. Her sign gives new rules for spelling vowels: a, e, i, o, and u for short vowels, and ae, ee, ie, oe, ue for long ones. Maebee that’s not such a bad sistem, thoe it miet taek a little getting uesed tue.
there are seriously people who seriously attempt to reform the spelling of the English language? good for them, but I doubt the language will be reformed by anything other than time. Language isn’t designed to be logical, and probably won’t become so.
Yeah, have you seen French?
I personally think they should concentrate on things like th, ch, zh.
But weird spelling makes it INTERESTING!
Six down, four to go. Too many commercials!
Round 8 begins…
Elizabeth Platz from Missouri gets rhytidome, and… looks nervous… asks for more information… and misses it! Two more spellers in the round. If they both miss, all four will spell again.
Now it’s Shantanu Srivatsa, with ochidore — misses! Anamika could take it on the next word.
Anamika Veeramani — Juvia — a Brazil nut — nails it! But she needs one more to win the bee.
Naturally, ABC piles on the commercials.
Anamika from Cleveland gets stromuhr, a medical instrument. Gets it! The winner!
She’s so poised. Just that little hint she might burst if she dared to smile. It would be nice if they’d agree on how to pronounce her name.
Did she look happy to you? It was hard for me to tell. I thought she might just be tired and relieved that it was all over. Some of the spellers, like the girl from Canada, were obviously enjoying themselves, but I wondered whether Anamika might be doing it just to please her parents. I’m sure motivations vary a lot among the different spellers. Maybe speller73 can tell us something about that.
I, too, wish the announcers and judges could have decided whether to call her Ana-MEE-ka or A-NAH-mika. All they had to do was ask her which was right.
Getting her name wrong was just so insulting because it was so unnecessary.
I wondered the same about her motivations. But there was one split second — I can’t remember exactly when, maybe a beat or two after she won, as if the realization had just sunk in — when it seemed she was wrestling to keep her lips from smiling her face into pieces.
It’s possible I read too much into it because her expression reminded me of myself during my brother’s wedding when I had to constantly bite the inside of my cheeks to keep from going supernova with joy. My other brother told me I looked like “grim as death” during the whole ceremony.
She seemed more relaxed in the interview and showed a sense of humor — not easy to do while being assaulted by a chirpy fashion disaster with a microphone. </catty_GAPA_moment>
I liked her little dig at the commercial breaks.
For the overseer of such a wildly varied group of young people to call something a fashion disaster, it must have been burning people’s eyes out at 50 yards.
Admittedly, I’ve been judged a fashion disaster any number of times myself, but I make a point of never playing one on TV.
If you’re under 21, I prefer to think in terms of “fashion experiments.”
In my opinion she actually didn’t seem too happy – I mean, I’m sure she was excited, but like Robert said going back to the clip she looks more relieved that it was all over. Still, I’m always really happy for the winner, seeing as they put so much time into this.
OK, I didn’t see the bee, I haven’t looked too much at the words or anything, and pretty much all I know is what I heard from my parents, but from that, I gather that this year’s bee was kind of terrible. For one thing, Carolyn Andrews, the main word list person, left in January, so we wound up with a mix of impossible words that had never been in a bee before and words that were on the list that all the serious spellers at least looked at (such as the winning word). And then to top that off, there was the whole thing where they stopped round 6 half way through… I could say more, but I’ll stop for now.