A puzzling little blog still looking for its voice, but sometimes gets lost and has trouble finding its way.
Wednesday, June 6, 2018
Spelling Words Are Useless, Especially Used in Sentences
First, my apologies for the mangling of the M. Ciccone quote for my title. I have been waiting for the opportunity to try to use it somewhere, and today seemed to be the best chance. Anyway, it is that time of year again. Last week was the National Spelling Bee. If you are a long time reader, you may remember how I enjoy watching the competition, as well as pointing out some of its shortcomings. This time around cannot be more different from last year's event. Instead of a lengthy championship round that used specialized, but not too rare a list of words, this year had the shortest round possible, with three words connected to philosophical matters. Leading up to the final rounds, many of the spellers got caught by missing double letters. I even recognized many of the words, including 'shamir', a worm-like creature from Hebraic folklore that could eat through anything, and 'Mnemosyne', a titan of memory from Greek mythology (it also is the name of a supernatural power from used by ghosts in the White Wolf/Onyx Path Publishing role-playing game Wraith: the Oblivion). I especially liked the example sentence used for the last one. I student wanted to say a prayer for help in a history exam, but couldn't remember her name. The final round started with the word 'bewusstseinstage' which is a German word that means the conscious state achieved without sensory output, or something like that. She forgot to double the first 's' and got eliminated. The other player then had to spell two words to win. First, he had 'haecceitas', a Latin word describing the most important states of an individual. Finally, he had to spell 'koinonia', a Greek word for the spiritual communion felt by a group of Christian fellowship. I don't remember 'Christian' being used in the definition for telecast, but other outlets did mention it. Overall, it was a good bee. I laughed at many of the 'use it in a sentence' examples. I loved the one where Moses was misquoted as sayint the lyrics to Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off." By the way, the words in blue were not recognized by spell check, which makes a lot of sense if you think about it.
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