A trophy? All I ever got for winning was a noogie from a bully. Via litlnemo @ Flickr.
I’d like to offer up my heartiest, harpiest high-five to Kavya Shivashankar, who yesterday won the 2009 Scripps National Spelling Bee.
I have always loved words and spelling (my typos on here rankle me terribly), and I competed in bees every year through grade school. I made it to the state level in both 7th and 8th grade, but never progressed to Nationals, despite months of daily study. (Sadface. You never forget the words you go out on.) But I look forward to the broadcasts of final rounds of the bee each year, and I delight in their struggles and successes, as well as their various quirks and weirdnesses, which strike awfully close to this Dork’s heart.
Shivashankar, 13, was one of 293 spellers, and made it through 16 rounds before she clinched the honors with “Laodicean.” This was her fourth year making it to Nationals. She has won more than $40,000 in scholarship money which she can apply to the college of her choice–but no George Plimpton Hot Plate. You can see all of her words here, or read bio info on her and her fellow finalists (7 of the 11 are girls!) here.
Congrats, Kavya!
P.S. If you haven’t seen the documentary Spellbound, get thee to a Netflix queue!
Thoracodynia.
(You’re right: I’ll never forget.)
Lettuce and bridge.
P.S. Spelling bees are torture for we people who cannot visualize things in our heads.
As opposed to the other places one might visualize things, of course.
father.of.a.lesser.god would always indulge my inner spelling geek and challenge me with words to spell while taking the crosstown bus when I was about 5. I always got tripped up on “chandelier”. Damn you, chandelier!
Congrats to young Kavya Shivashankar, and to all those awesome kids who took part in this. I have not seen spellbound, but I confess to being partial to Akeelah and the Bee.
I had no idea that baignoire counted as an english word^^
Congrats, Kavya!
I have always found those contests fascinating, I don’t believe we have them in the Netherlands.
We do have, however, a yearly spelling contest on the national broadcast. It’s a story written by a Dutch author with a lot of difficult words in it, and there are people participating on the show, but you can participate at home as well. The next day all language geeks are bragging about their score
(I’m very bad at it, partly because I’m too slow and can’t keep up with the sentences being dictated 
)
Yup… to this day I can’t remember any of the hundreds of words I got right, but the ones I got wrong will ALWAYS be right there. Every now and then when she’s feeling ornery, my mother will ask me to spell “mastodon”.
I got third place in the county spelling be as a wee fourth grader and the youngest in the competition. And then some jerk broke my bee trophy when I brought it to class for show and tell. I don’t remember the word I missed though!
Yeah, or ecossaise? Which, if I recall correctly is Scottish in the feminine? Ah, it’s a dance, too. Lots of french originating words in that list. In elementary school, we had spelling teams in my school district, and I was on the team in 4th, 5th and 6th grade. 2nd in 4th grade and 1st in 5th and 6th. My gramma gave me a scrap book when I graduated high school and she had the newspaper clippings for each of those… My gramma is so cool.
8th grade spelling bee champ here! I won with the word ecclesiastical.
But that was nothing compared to these kids and their mad spelling game–I was never anywhere near their league. Go Kavya!
@Becky: For years I said “elastical” instead of “ecclesiastical”. Yup, I’m a genius. Luckily that stopped before I went off to college with the intention of being a religion major.