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Who Hates Whom:
Well-Armed Fanatics,
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Watched the big Spelling Bee on tape last night.
(This was just a few nights after watching the Geography Bee, hosted with great delight by a certain formerly-mustachioed fellow I'm rather fond of. Yes, I am a geek. But you knew that.)
Obviously, it's a lot of fun to play along, watching these genius
preteens easily parse words which sound like completely random noises
made as a joke by drunken illiterates with no teeth. These were actual
words, my hand to god:
Oligopsony
Agnolotti
Hooroosh
Gomphosis
Pronaos
All of which these kids spelled correctly. While barely even blinking.
When Samir Patel, an adorable fetus from Fort Worth, was given Hooroosh, he looked absolutely delighted. Because he knew the word, people. Apparently, he walks around Fort Worth tugging on people's pantlegs and using the word Hooroosh in sentences all the time.
That's just not natural.
Pretty soon I felt dwarfed by these blastocysts in khaki pants. So the mind wanders... and, hey...
Say, how the hell do you closed-caption a contest involving so many nearly-impossible words?
Answer: you don't. You can't.
So this is what they do, and it makes the competition even more fun to
watch, especially as the word gets repeated back and forth by the
contestant and the judge, while the player studies the pronounciation,
considers the derivation, and sometimes just stalls for damn time:
[Word.]
[Word?]
[Word.]
What part of speech is it?
[Word] is a noun. [Word.]
[Word?]
Yes. [Word.]
Are there any alternate pronounciations?
There are three pronounciations: [Word] or [Word] and the slight variant [Word].
And so on. And all the while, you can see the glowing lights bouncing
back and forth in their little Cylon brains as they gradually hone in
on another impossible spelling of a word they've probably never seen:
[Worrrrd.]
[Wurrd?]
No, [Worrrrd.]
Can I have the derivation?
[Worrrrd] is from the Sanskrit, with a Choctaw combining form.
Oh. Of course. [Worrrrd.]
[Worrrrd.] Yes.
Can you use it in a sentence?
Yes. "When Dwight first encountered Ishtar, he made an enormous [worrrd] in his pants."
Oh! [Worrrrd.] OK.
[Worrrrd.] You have thirty seconds.
Does that include the Mandarin diminutive suffix [-rrrd], meaning a very small clenching noise?
And so on, until the kid somehow spits the thing out, damn near every single time.
I am in awe.
This is the actual list of words that the winning kid pulled out:
Cabochon
Priscilla
Oligopsony
Sphygmomanometer
Prosciutto
Rideau
Pompier
Terete
Tristachyous
Schefflera
Ornithorhynchous
Agio
Agnolotti
Peccavi
Ceraunograph
Exsiccosis
Hodiernal
Appoggiatura
And here's the kicker: I just tried to congratulate the winner from memory... and honest to God, I can't even spell the kid's name.
Congratulations, Anurag Kashyap of San Diego, California.
You rool.
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