The National Spelling Bee threw a curve ball at potential competitors this week.
The Spelling Bee announced that as part of its qualification tests for the semifinals and championship finals, spellers will now not only have to spell the words, but know what they mean as well.
As if the memorization of hundreds upon hundreds of words wasn’t taking enough time out of these pint-sized, brainy parrots’ childhoods. Now they’ll have to actually learn something too?
This kind of change makes you wonder what these event organizers are trying to accomplish. In recent years, the increasingly out of touch with reality championship-winning words have made it clear that the Spelling Bee is not about learning. It’s about winning.
That, and memorizing words that you will never ever use in an actual conversation.
Seriously, last year’s winning word was “guetapens.” Try typing that into your word processor and your spellcheck will start shouting at you.
For the truly curious, it’s a noun, and is an ambush, snare or trap.
And used in a sentence: The Spelling Bee committee set a guetapens for the unsuspecting contestants.
Here’s hoping this will bring some of the vocab words back to the world of the vernacular (noun- the standard native language of a country or locality).
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More on the Story: NPR
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