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Will spell for guerdon
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Will spell for guerdon
  Hey, you catch the National Spelling Bee finals on television recently? Me either. My appreciation for fine spelling isn’t keen enough to make me spend hours watching a bunch of kids spell words they will never, ever use in a sentence.  But I did see the clip of Sameer Mishna, an eighth-grader from Indiana who showed remarkable composure when asked to spell “numbnut.” At least that’s what he thought he was asked to spell. “Numbnut?” Mishna asked in a tone of disbelief. When his announcer-pronouncer explained he meant a pad of sheepskin or foam placed beneath a horse’s saddle, Mishna looked blank for a moment, then exclaimed, “Oh! Numnah! That’s a relief.” Mishna spelled the word correctly, and went on to win the competition, taking home more than $40,000 in cash and prizes. I used to be one of those spelling kids. I won school spelling bees three years in a row, in fifth, sixth and seventh grades. One year I placed high enough in the next, citywide round that if the winner and runner-up had been run over by trucks or mauled by bears, I’d have gone on to the state competition. They stayed disappointingly healthy, and I never advanced beyond that point. I never heard of a numnah. Neither has my dictionary, or my spellchecker. Here are some of the other words contestants spelled, or didn’t, in the 2008 Bee:  guerdon I don’t know any of those words. Back when I spelled competitively, most of the words were English. And we called our numnahs, saddle blankets. I don’t remember words I spelled correctly back then. I remember the ones I screwed up. “Yeoman,” one year. Can’t remember how I spelled it, probably without the “e”. One year it was “blackguard,” which wounded me greatly when I discovered it was a word I had read many times (I was into Gothic romance then). I’d never heard it spoken, and had no idea it was pronounced “blaggard.”  Then there was the tragic “sacrilegious” mistake, in my final year of competition, when I’d gotten the farthest. Sacrilegious is a tricky word because, although it’s based on the word “religious,” the “re” is changed to “ri” and the “li” to “le”. The aged word maven who pronounced for us that year (and every year in the citywide competitions) pronounced it carefully for me, as sak-ree-LIJ-uhs. She seemed pretty sure the second syllable contained a hard “e”. It doesn’t. It’s pronounced sak-ruh-LIJ-uhs or sak-ruh-LEE-juhs. But always sak-ruh, never sak-ree. Anyway, I made the second spelling change, but left the “re” as it was in “religious”.  I may still be a little peeved about that one. I’m not positive. I’ll have to get in touch with my inner speller later and see if it’s still holding that grudge. My competitive spelling days are over, I’m afraid. Still, I don’t regret my geeky spelling bee days. Through many years of journalism, co-workers used me as a dictionary and thesaurus, and they never stumped me, because newspapers don’t run that many stories about secernent opificers experiencing sudation beneath their sheitels while earning their guerdon, and engaging in prosopopoeia toward their empyrean, brankursine alcarazzas.  They’d just write that a sweaty worker perspired under her wig while earning her pay, and spoke to her heavenly, bear claw-like jug as if it was alive. No, the words that worried my co-workers were the ones like hemorrhage, cemetery (it does sound like it should be “ary”, doesn’t it?) calendar (I know, it sounds like it should be “er”, but it isn’t), separate (there’s always a rat in separate), and desperate (the “arat” rule only works for separate).  An aside here: Spelling bees are always sponsored by newspapers, which is odd because, in my experience, the majority of journalism school graduates couldn’t spell their way out of a hydrophanous receptacle composed of thin, fibrous material. I could do tricks, of course, like antidisestablishmentarianism. But really, if someone talks to you about their opposition to the withdrawal of state support or recognition from an established church, they’re probably going to say that, and not antidisestablishmentarianism.  My spell checker says I got that right, both times, on the first try. Hah! Anyway, the first year I won the spelling bee, in fifth grade, was pretty cool. Cherokee Elementary went through sixth grade, which means I beat a bunch of kids older than me. In my sixth grade year, winning seemed to be expected, and wasn’t as much fun. In seventh grade, I anxiously went on to junior high and my spelling prowess won me a lot of cachet. One day in the lunch line, a ninth-grade girl eyed me and said, “You’re that chick who spells, right?” When I acknowledged it, she said, “Huh,” and turned back to her older, more sophisticated friends. Oh, yeah. Good times. 
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