I’ve been addicted to the news for years and by design it’s mostly negative, so it’s refreshing when a heartwarming story comes along like the one about the 14 year old eighth grader, Dev Shah, winning the Scripps National Spelling Bee this past week. The sheer joy on the boy’s face after he won was infectious.
Shah beat 228 other contestants with words like probouleutic, zwitterion, and schistorrachis, and then finally won the last round with psammophile, which earned the young man a nice trophy and a $50,000 check to go with it.
While I can’t come close to that level of spelling proficiency, I do pretty well in part because my first grade teacher, Mrs. Selland, thought that spelling was the single most important subject that could be taught in school.
As a result, all 5 kids in our family excelled in spelling, with Mom aiding and abetting the teacher’s efforts. My older sister even made it from the one-room country school we all attended to the regional bee in Minneapolis.
Now most people rely on spellcheck built into our devices and rarely have to think about word composition, but we need to be very careful - those apps are faulty.
Probouleutic, zwitterion, schistorrachis, and psammophile all show up on my screen as being misspelled.
From what I see on social media, a lot of people can’t spell and, apparently, don’t care. It appears that they don’t even bother to use their spell checker.