I’ve Got a Spell on You

If you’ve been a regular visitor to this site, you know that I’m not a very good speller.  In fact, even with Spell Check, I spell poorly. “From” is often automatically changed to “form,” while “Libertarian” is involuntarily changed to “Democrat.”  But I digress.

I tried to learn using those drills in grammar school – incidentally, I just misspelled “grammar” using an ‘e’ – all to no avail.  I had paperback school spelling books that prompted me into spelling words, most of which wound up being spelled incorrectly, much to the chagrin to my father.

When writing, I still must use that drill “i before e except after c, when it’s a Tuesday after a full moon.”

Dad was a great speller, but he regularly read the morning newspaper which is chock full of words.  I, too, perused the paper, but never thought of memorizing the correct placement of letters therein.  Hence, my inability to spell.

So it was with great interest that I closely followed the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which was recently held for kids who are good guessers at spelling words.

Please keep in mind that I am well into retirement, my age dictating close to two full boxes of thirty-six birthday candles.  As an aside, my cakes are often brought to the tables raw, and are easily thoroughly cooked by those burning candles.

This year’s Scripps spelling champion was Ananya Vinay, a 12-year old from California, who correctly spelled the word “marocain.”  Yep, marocain.  No, it’s not some narcotic your local high school senior sells you in a Ziplock baggie in a fast food parking lot, rather it is another word for dress fabric of ribbed crepe.

This begs the question, “Why not simply use the words ‘dress fabric of ribbed crepe’?”

Clearly someone felt it imperative to create a special word for this niche cloth.

This is where I felt compelled to dig deeper into past Scripps Spelling Bees for more unnecessary words.

It seems that 2012 was another historic time for those wordsmiths in dire need of more words, one of them being “guetapens.”  No kidding.  That’s a real word correctly spelled by Snigdha Nandipati.

Guetapens is a French-derived word that means an ambush or a trap.  Once again, I don’t recall, in any of my six-plus decades, anyone asking me for another word – in French – for an ambush of trap.  Still, it exists.  Yeah!

Kavya Shivashankar spelled laodicean in 2009 to win, while in 2005, Anurag Kashyap won with the word appoggiatura.

Just in case you are wondering, as I am writing this story, that über effective Spell Check has been neatly placing red, squiggly lines beneath all those winning words.  You see, they are not even in the computer’s dictionary so, how legitimate are they?

Something else needs to be pointed out.  Obviously, these winners have been blessed with names that are just as challenging as the bee words themselves.  In fact, the spelling bee words actually seem easier to spell than their family surnames.

I’m still never going to use the word laodicean in a sentence, or otherwise.  Look it up like I had to.