One for the Smart Kids

2 June 2006



National Spelling Bee Hits Prime Time on ABC

Last night, the American Broadcasting Corporation took a break from “Desperate Housewives,” “Lost,” and “Wife Swap,” to pay some attention to kids who actually succeed in school. The Scripps National Spelling Bee dates from 1941, when the E.W. Scripps Co., a media conglomerate, assumed sponsorship from the Louisville Courier-Journal which started the bee in 1925. This was the first time it aired on broadcast TV.

When it comes to writing a language down, English is almost certainly the worst on Planet Earth. Other languages are either vastly more phonetic or use pictograms rather than letters. None has so many exceptions, and none is so illogical. “Laugh,” “stuff” and “graph” all end with the same sound – spelled three different ways. The only way to learn this is to memorize it.

Needless to say, most people who write and read in English are not particularly adept at spelling. “There” and “their” still defeats a great many top business leaders, and “loose” turns up frequently when the word meant is “lose.” And then, there are the kids from the spelling bee, who can spell words that most folks wouldn’t know were even words such as “tychopotamic,” “monochromatic” and “malihini.” Those were from the preliminary rounds this year.

In the end, the winner was Katharine Close of Spring Lake, New Jersey, age 13. The word that put the contest away was "ursprache," meaning roughly "a parent language." This journal maintains that it is not actually an English word but rather a German word used by anglophone intellectual poseurs. Still, that does not detract from Ms. Close' achievement, and she deserves the $42,000 in cash and prizes.

What is really important here, though, is that Reality TV has finally started paying attention to something other than bug eating and sucking up to Donald Trump. There is a dreadful anti-intellectual streak in American culture; “if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” No one ever says, "if you're so rich, why aren't you smart?" This, of course, explains why the children of immigrants are disproportionately represented in contests like the Spelling Bee and last week’s Geography Bee – the native-born are socially discouraged from excelling if they possess intellectual talent. Now, just maybe, children who succeed intellectually in America will start to get a fraction of the accolades that jocks and rappers get. Maybe one should also wish for a pony.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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