watching the national spelling bee on ESPN

Spell:fuckyouverymuch.

"origin please? can you use it in a sentence?"

That was the 97 bee, the latest bee was after and was one by a girl from the Jersery shore who seemed relatively well-adjusted.

Who was forced? Somebody call the cops!

That's asking a lot.

First of all, why is this just limited to middle-schoolish children? Why not adults as well? Seems hard enough.

Second...my girlfriend explained that its a lot more then rote memorization, that they understand the etymology and roots of words and can figure out how words are spelled that they've never even heard before...so why is it fair to include words that are obviously NOT part of the english language and have no way to discern the history...I'm looking at you "Norouz" aka the Persian New Year, a word which, when googled, seems to have 14 different spellings.

And what was with the emphasis on Persian and Babalonian history and religion? There were like 3 words derived from ancient cults and sects.

HELLO obv she had words written on her hands, and when she left the stage it was to ask her coach how to spell things, and the awful clothes were to put off the other contestants. she's not as innocent as you think.

Dan, it's limited to kids because it's intended less as an open sporting competition and more of an academic/extracurricular pursuit -- i.e., you don't allow adults for the same reasons you don't allow adults in high-school debate or track or whatever. I assume the cap is partly traditional -- spelling bees are for younger kids, really, not a high-school pursuit -- but mostly because the hardcore kids put in a lot of time, in a way you wouldn't want to ask of high-school kids, who could be spending their time on much better, less-specific things. Middle school is probably the most appropriate time for someone to get all into spelling bees.

As for foreign words my understanding was always that they didn't use anything that has significant variation in its English transliteration -- were there really some that broke that rule? Normally all loan words, no matter how obscure, are either from languages that share our alphabet or have pretty definite English spellings.

How do they justify the Persian New Year?

So any word that appears in an English text and can be verified against the master dictionary there is fair game -- you'd just need to be the kind of middle-school kid who happens to know how Merriam-Webster likes to transliterate Farsi.

"is what euonym good"? "As um euonyming name"???

wtf did she say???

illicium, man that was a tough one 😕

"The dreaded schwa claims another."