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| A bee in my bonnet |
| Papi Menon / San Francisco Jun 20, 2010, 00:37 IST |
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How is that Indian kids walk away with the top prize in spelling bee competitions in the US every year?
Last week one of the great modern American traditions played out in the media. It was time again to find out which kid in this vast land could step up and give the nation what it so desperately needed — the correct spelling for words like soubresaut and nahcolite. It was time again for the Scripps National Spelling Bee. In a tradition that has become almost as reliable as the Bee itself, another Indian kid walked away with the top prize this year. Anamika Veeramani won the final round spelling stromuhr — which means a device whose name no one can spell. Her name in turn presented reporters with their own little spelling quandary, one that they could not escape even with the help of a dictionary.
The spelling bee is a curious American tradition. There is hardly another place in the world where spelling is treated in such cavalier fashion in everyday life. Yet, the spelling bee attracts tremendous interest among children and parents. It is considered a test of the intellect, of hard work and mental rigor. Part of the competition’s mystique in recent years has been that the winner will be a kid from South East Asia with an unpronounceable name. Last year’s winner was Kavya Shivashankar, a name that’s about as all-American as Mom’s aloo-gobi. At this year’s competition, parents of some of the less fortunate kids, who were ousted with dastardly, underhand, almost-French words like siffleur, darkly hinted that Indian parents gave their kids unlikely names like Hariharasubramaniam just to prep them for future spelling competitions. What chance does a John or Jake stand against such a resplendent flowering of syllables? They are outgunned from the crib, these parents argued. Perhaps they do have a point.
The movie Spellbound first catapulted the spelling bee into the limelight. What had until then been a relatively low-key event reserved for the socially inept suddenly became a major media circus. The degree of difficulty of the words had been increasing steadily even before the movie took things to its current ridiculous, even pathological, levels. A look at the winning words over the years captures this progression in poignant detail. In the year 1940, the winning word was therapy — a word that even I could spell with some degree of confidence without invoking my spell checker. By 1960, the word that won the day was eudaemonic, a word that no gentleman should ever be forced to use. In 1980, it was elucubrate, and if that word does not deserve to be locked up in a padded cell for all eternity, then I don’t know what is. Thus we arrive at the current stromuhr-ian state of affairs, where therapy, far from being a winning word, is a real medical probability for the contestants.
I must confess that I did not watch the competition. Watching these little children sweat and struggle over such mighty words is too nerve-wracking. I did read the interviews with some of the competitors. One little fellow, who was undone by some verbal monstrosity, said he wanted to be a rock star when he grew up. I wish him all success, and am eagerly awaiting his breakout album. The lyrics should be interesting.
(Papi Menon is a writer and technologist based in San Francisco)
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