Spelling bee time - Brian
The US National Spelling Bee is coming up soon, I know you’ve already got your TiVo set for it. I probably won’t watch, it embarrasses me that the kids in the contest can spell words I have never even heard of. I get reminded of how my Spanish could be better every day in a hundred little ways, the last thing my ego needs is to be reminded that I’m not so good at English either.
For a while I had been wondering if there was such a thing as a spelling bee in Spanish; it is a phonetic language so my first thought was it would be silly to have one as any fluent speaker should be able to spell any word they hear. It turns out they do exist. While I haven’t seen one, this post about a spanish spelling bee contains what I suspect is the telling hint in the comments about what makes these hard – when the word is poorly pronounced it is very difficult to spell it correctly.
I was also curious about why it’s a “bee” and not something else, but alas not even the Scripps people who organize the national spelling bee know why its a “bee”