Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/03/09/5-year-old-wins-tulsa-spelling.html
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A j-shaped banana.
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My stepmom and her sister both cleared the state level when they were in junior high, and her sister won a set of Encyclopedia Brittanica. This news is really going to make her day.
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“Edith, an encyclopedia is like Wikipedia, but it’s made from dead trees and wrapped in dead cows… because it’s less neckbeardy than Wikipedia… no, I don’t know why everyone doesn’t own one…”
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or short for Je suis Nana! I would have expected much simpler words for that age group.
Cat - erpillar
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I’m sorry - it’s “caterpillar.”
well that’s embarrassing …
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It’s a Canadian thing.
I hear about these spelling bees and I am wholly baffled by the utility of being able to spell, say, the name of an 18th-ventury Vietnamese drumming technique featuring an entirely improbable collection of consonants mashed together.
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I don’t know the technique you’re referring to (assuming it’s not something you just made up), but my favorite musical word in any language is skrzyprze, the Polish word for violin.
My favorite spelling bee word is dghajsa, which is a Maltese boat. I’m glad I know that, on the off chance that I ever visit Malta and go on a … oh fuck how do you pronounce that?
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It’s not even a question of utility, it’s that it’s not an English word. It’s not even a foreign loan word in common enough use that it could be considered an adoptee (gesundheit, hor d’oeuvres.) Finally, since it’s transliterated from Sanskrit, there isn’t only one “correct” way to spell it in our alphabet.
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