Robert Marsland Wins First National Vocabulary Championship

The inaugural National Vocabulary Championship will air on the Game Show Network on April 15. Apparently, “Deal or No Deal” and “Are You As Smart as a Fifth Grader” are such lowbrow draws on prime-time top network TV that the GSN had to actually find something hard to cover. Robert Marsland of Wisconsin won the whole shebang along with $40,000 for college. That makes him this journal’s American Idol.

As with any national championship in a country that spans a continent, there was a long qualifying process. First, students at a participating school had to take an in-school qualifying exam in order to compete in city level round. City winners went to regionals, and they competed for a place in the national finals. The top 50 wound up at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, a building that houses most of the words that exist. Mayor Bloomberg even showed up to address the finalists.

The questions resembled those found on the SATs, for example, “which word is an antonym for “disrespectful”? Options offered in the sample test were “reverent, superfluous, dubious, and blasphemous.” Not too difficult for someone who reads, but every once in a while, one will run across a word that is brand new (in daily life a delight, but in a competition like this, it’s deadly).

Mr. Marsland won the last point by knowing the Latin root of “solipsism,” which is “solus.” Clearly, a working knowledge of Latin and Greek are helpful here, as elsewhere. In that it resembles the long-revered “spelling bee,” a tradition in American schools since the one-room school house days and McGuffey’s Readers. There, however, the resemblance more or less ends.

Knowing words is vastly more important than knowing how they are (arbitrarily) spelled. In societies where the written word doesn’t exist, words still possess meaning. Moreover, thinking occurs when there are words with which to express ideas. Spelling often prevents thinking because one is worried about the idiotic rule of “i before e expect after c or when sounded as A, as in neighbor and weigh.” Or in words that just don’t follow rules like “weird, atrocities, deity, atheist, absenteeism, being, freeing, leisure, neither, plebeian.” Enough exceptions and there is no rule.

In 1984, Orwell talked about the destruction of words (Newspeak) and its capacity to constrict thought. The National Vocabulary Championship will never make it to prime time on a major network. However, the ability of a few clever kids to preserve the magic of words and to pass them along is worthwhile. Good on ya, Robert.

© Copyright 2007 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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