Eight contestants tied for first place at the Scripps National Spelling Bee Thursday in Maryland. I’m sad that I know this. I’m sad that ESPN and the media in general continue to celebrate this orthographical memorization contest and don’t instead find a more interesting and academically useful contest to cover like a sporting event.
Allow me to again promote the idea of a vocabulary bee — an event that would require contestants to define and understand the subtleties of unusual words, not simply put their letters in correct order.
Having a large, active vocabulary is far more directly useful in life — in speaking, in writing, in reading — than knowing how to spell such words as erysipelas, aiguillette and pendeloque, which came up during this year’s weird finish.
