Jersey Girl Triumphs Over Canadian Menace
We did catch the Scripps National Spelling Bee last night, televised from its location across town in the belly of the Grand Hyatt. Katharine Close, an eighth-grader from Spring Lake, New Jersey, vanquished Finola Mei Hwa Hackett, from Alberta, Canada. After Hackett got tripped up by Weltschmerz, Close correctly spelled Ursprache for the title. How d’ya like dem apples — eh?
For the spelling bee aficionados among you, a few more comments appear after the jump.
Actually, we don’t have much to add to the excellent write-up of our Gotham-based sibling. We did catch the Chris Connelly comment that they paraphrased, made after Hackett spelled an especially difficult word: “Finola’s middle name is Mei Hwa, which means ‘beautiful flower’ in Chinese. And she’s certainly blossoming on this stage tonight!”
The Swift Report offers this satiric take on the proceedings. But it doesn’t clearly read as satire — which is kinda scary.
Katharine Close Is Smarter Than Us All; Chris Connelly, Not So Much [Gawker]
Group Objects to Words of Foreign Origin in National Spelling Bee [Swift Report]
Prime-Time Pressure For Top Spellers [WP]
N.J. Girl Wins National Spelling Bee [NYT]
READ MORE: awards, canadians, chris connelly, contests, kids, prizes
Never mind the foreign words; why are foreign children allowed to compete in the National Spelling Bee of our nation? I'm not talking about immigrants; I'm talking about Canadians. They should have their own spelling bee. With lots of "u"s.
by jfruh on 06/02/06 01:13 PM
The over / under on the final word (the one the losing kid would misspell) was 10 1/2, aka, ten letters or less you take the under, 11 letters or over you take the over. I bet my co-worker, took the over, and when that little Canadian asked for her bonus time I was hopping up and down on my couch. I've never cheered on humiliating childhood, nationally televised failure like that before. And I fuckin' won. What is a bit surprising is given how much work those kids put in on learning etymology and language of origin, is that she blew the fact that Germans pronounce their W's like V's. Duh!
by Ascender on 06/02/06 01:31 PM
Hah! 350 million people versus 50 million, and we're still in the running. You can't stop us. You can't hold us back. We're Canadians. Week after week, we hold back the flood of American ideas, of American culture. Now we're fighting back!
Phase one: Spelling Bee.
Phase two: uhhhh.... doughnuts and... coffee??
Phase three: uh. pretending to be a liberal and environmentally-conscious country while really being neither at all, and voting a Conservative government into power.
Ha! There's your weltzchmerz, eh.
P.S. Just so you all know, my friend from Sweden is only marginally more impressed by Canada as she is by The States (which is what we call you up here).
by Alfonso X. Alfonse on 06/02/06 01:40 PM
while we in the states take it as a compliment that a swede would be more impressed by canada the the US. we must be doing something right.
by ogz on 06/02/06 02:01 PM
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