In a nation besotted by “American Idol,” the announcement by ABC that the Scripps National Spelling Bee is hitting prime time makes perfect sense. What more could a television viewer want? A gaggle of preternaturally intense kids. A cutthroat, sudden-death competition. The terror of getting some arcane word lobbed at you by the judges, having one chance to spell it right.
Watch the faces of these young spellers as they wrestle with words you’ve never heard of and will never use.
This is a contact sport.
For the first time since it began in 1925, the bee will ascend to live network prime time Thursday for its finals. We don’t usually promote television programs in this space, but we can’t see how anyone would want to miss this one.
“I think we’re ready for prime time, and I think America is ready for spelling bees in prime time too,” says Paige Kimble, the bee’s director and its 1981 national champion.
This nation has embraced movies like 2002’s “Spellbound,” and the current “Akeelah and the Bee.” The Broadway musical “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” is another incarnation of this fascination with a contest that most of us experienced in grade school or junior high and tried to forget.
It seems that almost every other competition–from cheerleading to high-stakes poker–is televised and glorified. Competitive spellers deserve no less.
Becoming a champion speller takes tremendous diligence and memorization powers. The kids are responsible for knowing every word in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, unabridged–more than 450,000 entries. Any of them may be tossed at a speller.
Most of all, these spellers must love the words. They must experience the thrill of learning a new and exotic word, unlocking its meaning and then locking its spelling into a memory already teeming with other arcane words.
“Good memorization skills will take you only so far, and they won’t take you to the final rounds of the national spelling bee,” says Kimble. “What these kids have to do is they have to become good word sleuths.” They have to know a little Latin, a little Greek, and a whole lot about other languages–French, Spanish, German, Swahili and more because English is fed by many languages.
As a nation of crossword addicts, Scrabble players and word game aficionados (one f, not two) can attest, there’s an undeniable appeal here.
While most of us don’t aspire to the Olympian heights of these spellers, spelling is a skill well worth developing. A single misspelled word in a job application, for instance, sends a terrible signal to a prospective employer. Yes, there are spell-checking programs on computers and some people say spelling is not really important anymore. But they’re rong, rong, rong.
