It has now been 47 years since my brush with spelling greatness, but the memories are sharp enough for me to appreciate and enjoy accounts of the 76th annual Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee.
I learned to read at 3, not because I was particularly bright, but because we were poor and my mother was bored and taught me for kicks. Spelling came easily to me, but my spelling bee future was fairly dim.
There was no skipping of grades in Florida schools in the 1950s. Educators thought it was better that you stay with your chronological peers. But in the fifth grade I had a forward-thinking teacher named Walter Olszack who snuck me a seventh-grade spelling book and tested me separately from the rest of the class.
But the luck of the draw (my story and I am sticking to it) was unkind in spelling bee competition. I seemed to get impossible words in early rounds and was eliminated early two years in a row.
In the sixth grade I moved to a smaller school in a rural area and fared better.
I can still remember standing on the basketball court at Tropical Elementary School in Miami with Janie Guy, the other finalist, and hearing her misspell appendicitis.
I was jubilant and tense at the same time. I could do appendicitis, but with my luck the next word was sure to be a whopper, something like "deipnosophist," a word that actually came up in this year's national spelling bee. (A deipnosophist is a master of dinner table conversation, something known only, probably, to George Will and the people who make up spelling bee lists.)
But the next word was, in fact, "petroleum," one I actually knew.
I was, as they say in baseball, "going to the show."
The big time.
The Miami Herald-sponsored countywide spelling bee in what was then called Dade County.
It was a fairly large event. My mother and grandparents, who were estranged at the time, came in separate cars, and I was allowed to bring my sixth-grade girlfriend and saw nothing funny (as did everyone else) in her being about 5 feet 9 inches to my roughly 5 feet even (if I stretched).
I don't remember the word that I spelled in the first round, but in the second round I got flustered and spelled "livelihood" as "L-I-V-E-L-Y-H-O-O-D" and went down in ignominious disgrace.
There are some positives. I never forgot how to spell appendicitis or petroleum and, although I still cringe and wish I had sunglasses and a wig on when it comes up, I never forgot how to spell livelihood.
I also did better than the kid who spelled "cake," "K-A-K-E," and went down in the first round and was probably permanently marked by the occasion.
I also finally caught up to Mary Ann Frost in height, as noted at our 20-year high school reunion and before I began to shrink with age.
The challenge facing today's spellers appears to be a lot greater than what we had to deal with.
This year's field of national finalists, ranging in age from 8 to 15, aced "myelocyte," "beccafico," "quebrada" and "habiliments," according to the Houston Chronicle, not to mention "videlicet" and "scripophily."
Don't ask me what they mean. I recently got shot down by an editor for being too wordy with the term "inveigle," so I'm not about to tackle "scripophily."
(Actually, I tried to look up "scripophily" in my free online dictionary, which didn't have it but tried to refer me to an online dictionary service you have to pay for. Then I went to the dictionary the Times gives us, and it wasn't there. One of the Times' crack researchers informed me that it wasn't in the Oxford English Dictionary and I had an instant of glee thinking I might have caught the spelling bee folks in a misspelling and that I would be avenged for the "livelihood" disaster.
Alas, regardless of whether the dictionary people recognize the term, it appears frequently on the Internet and apparently refers to the hobby of collecting old stock, share and bond certificates.
