School Week: Speak and Spell

Spelling bees never really appealed to me. I never had the chance to participate in one growing up, so maybe it's an indoctrinated taste. It seems a bit like memorizing the color of all the parts of a car engine, or the track runtimes of every Beatles song. Possibly useful in the right context, but not really the thing we should be focusing on.

I realize I saw this as someone who has been a professional copy editor (or copyeditor, as various seditious factions would like it). I've seen my share of "Their was a grate game on Wendsday"s. I've been in the misspelling trenches. Everyone misspells words. MS Word catches it, or I catch it before it goes into print, or I read it elsewhere in print and win a little mental battle against the uncivilized world. Training a few hundred undiagnosed-Asperger's children to recite "protostomic" and "villainous" isn't going to do more than symbolically pull up the GPA of the global village. But the mean remains meanly ignorant: the average is below average. I grok it.

Neat-o facts: only English-speaking countries have spelling bees. Other languages tend to be simple enough so by hearing the word you know how to spell it. In China they have dictionary contests, though -- how quickly can you look up a word. And in Quebec they have transcription contests: hear a paragraph and see how much you can remember. (Maybe they'll choose one of my paragraphs...dare to dream.)

I couldn't resist interpreting the monotone existence of poor Manoj, subject of today's story Speak and Spell, into a recitation by an actual Speak and Spell. You think I'm joking. Take a listen. I'm not. I didn't mean to, it forced its way up past my larynx, into the mike, and then pressed about 45 buttons in order to get it recorded and posted. The tone you may hear in the background?: monotone.