It was pronounced identically to "whisper". Saying it at the beginning is more pointless.īks, I lost an elementary school spelling bee on the word "whisperer". John Thayer Jensen, it's important to say the word at the end so that you've definitively acknowledged that you're done spelling it. ![]() If you didn't do the first and third bits you also got knocked, which seemed to me bitterly unfair. I remember that the pattern you were supposed to use was: I knew that I had spelled it correctly, and I still carry a grudge. They asked me to spell it three times before tossing me out. It was the first and only word in the competition which required a capital and I was not familiar with the rule. ![]() I lost on the wordĬhristian because I did not say capital C. I came in second in the fifth grade, competing with sixth graders. I apologize to anyone among the Language Log readership who feels old after reading this. (I placed eleventh, lost on voluble, and knew every word in the top-ten round.) But my real triumph that year was winning the Illinois Reader's Digest Word Power Challenge, which got me a free trip to Universal Studios for the national competition. I won a third-edition Merriam-Webster dictionary, which my parents still use as our house-rules Scrabble dictionary. If we're comparing spelling bee stories, I placed third in Central Illinois in eighth grade (2005-06 the word I lost on was gaufrette). "Medical words are a common staple of the Scripps Spelling Bee, accounting for 15 of the winning words since the first winning word in 1925." That is, there may well be more training and higher proficiency now, but it sounds like this competition was doing the same thing back then. Here ( ) it says "myoclonus" was correctly spelled by a middle-schooler. Southworth may be comparing incomparables. I do not doubt these early language interests played a part. I also loved diagramming sentences – do they still teach that? Though my major at University was astronomy for my first two years, I changed to linguistics in year three and ended up with my MA in linguistics. I had competed the previous two years – alas, never even won for our class. I was in sixth grade in California in 1953-4. Filed by Victor Mair under Contests, Spelling.The kinds of words listed for recent competitions, such as myoclonus or bailliage, would probably have been beyond any of us in those days, and even now some of them are not familiar to me. ![]() Incidentally, my only preparation for the competition (apart from reading, and I was not a very wide or very voracious reader) was to go over, with my parents' help, lists of words which had been used in previous spelling bees. I comforted myself by noting that I was able to spell all the words introduced after I was eliminated, including one word missed by both the winners– synchronize–because I had encountered it in reading about aviation, my ruling passion of the time. The first and second-place winners were girls from Annunciation. In the competition, I was eliminated fairly early when I failed to spell regime (I was not into politics then). (I just learned these facts from Wikipedia.) The school was famous for its rote learning which, if nothing else, did produce good spellers. In those years the Buffalo contest was regularly won by girls from the Annunciation School, a parochial school built in 1928 and operated by the Sisters of St. In the spring of 1941, when I was in sixth grade, I was the spelling champion of Public School #30 in Buffalo, NY (which only went up to 6th grade), and I competed in the citywide Buffalo Spelling Bee.
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