To Bee or Not To Bee

Eye have a spell chequer

It came with my pea sea

It plainly marks four my revue

Miss steaks eye kin not sea

Eye strike a quay and type a word

And weight for it too say

Weather eye am wrong or write

It shows me strait a weigh



As soon as a mist ache is maid

It shoes before two long

And eye can put the error write

It’s rare lea ever wrong

Eye have run this poem threw it

I’m shore your please to no

It’s letter perfect all the weigh

My chequer towed me sew

-Anonymous



Spelling is a lost art. With the invention of spell check, most of us graduated grade school perfectly content with the thought that “I before E except after C” was a thing of the past, locked away with good penmanship in the cabinet of archaic talents. But what about those of us who didn’t want to say goodbye to the good old ABCs? For us, there was the spelling bee.

Few people know this about me, but I was a speller once. They didn’t make any movies about me, though, since I was eliminated in round two of the New York City qualifying spelling bee and never made it to nationals. After winning my district spelling bee, I dutifully studied the PAIDEIA book of words until letters swam in my head like alphabet soup. To this day, I still don’t know what PAIDEIA stands for, but I studied it anyway, visualizing words as my teachers had advised.

The day of the bee, my parents beamed with pride. My entire sixth grade class took a field trip to watch me represent my middle school and show New York City what a girl from Queens could do: namely, spell. They were late, and I was nervous. Turns out it was never meant to be, because when I spelled ‘embolism’ as ‘embulism’ (the speaker mispronounced it, I swear), the bell rang and my career as a competitive speller was D-O-N-E, with a capital D. The girl next to me got the word measles, and I left the stage tearfully.

I promise I’ve moved on.

Since the event seven years ago, I have hardly thought about my experience in the spelling bee. As a pre-med, I now know what an embolism is, and how to spell it, but I had rarely thought about how that one word, and the whole experience in general, made a difference in my life until a recent string of unrelated spelling events.

I often debate with friends of mine about the value of spelling in today’s modern society. They argue that spell check will always be there to save the day (though the poem above suggests otherwise). I argue that spelling skills are something to be proud of, and they save time and embarrassment. I also personally hate Word’s squiggly red lines, so spelling things correctly the first time is a must for me.

As a result of my experience, I am always interested when spelling is portrayed in pop culture. On last week’s episode of “Grey’s Anatomy,” two doctors performed brain surgery on a teenage boy, a spelling champion, in fact. The boy was awake during the procedure and the doctors tried to engage him in conversation to chart his progress.

Painfully shy, the boy hesitated to speak about baseball and girls, two topics with which he was obviously unfamiliar, but when he mentioned that he was a speller and the doctors challenged him with obscure medical terms, he lit up and even cracked jokes in the operating room. Scenarios like this only happen on television, but the spelling, for teens like him, is very real.

A few days later, AOL Instant Messenger News published an article about a girl from Montana who won her regional spelling bee after 41 rounds of head-to-head spelling competition. Wow!

Competitive spelling has been in the public eye for some time now. From movies like “Spellbound” to the Broadway play “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” to the ESPN airing of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, it seems to be that we like to watch spelling, though sometimes critically.

We observe, literally spellbound, as contestants string together letters in the unlikeliest of ways, and yet we criticize, sometimes their appearances and often their social skills. Sure, being able to spell supercalifragilisticexpialidocious may not win an invite to a party, but I think we would all like to be better spellers. If it were such an obsolete skill, we wouldn’t watch it and we certainly wouldn’t talk about it.

But rather than criticize, why not do something about it? These kids don’t have to rely on spell check, and neither should we. So take a trip down memory lane and dig up those old spelling lists. You shouldn’t have to suffer from ortographobia, and you’ll be able to spell it, too!