KEVIN LAZENBY OF OPELIKA, ALABAMA, COME ON DOWN! Welcome to Round Two of the 84th Annual Scripps National Spelling Bee.
There are two preliminary rounds today in which all 275 spellers will face the microphone, Dr. Jacque Bailly, and the cameras of ESPN3 online. Spellers receive 3 points for each word spelled correctly today; add that number to yesterday's written round score, and the top up-to-50 spellers advance to the semifinals tomorrow.
You can follow along in a few places (in addition to here): the Bee website, and a few places on Twitter worth noting: @ScrippsBee, @JGWhiteAP and hashtags #Bee11 and #SpellingBee.
And Kevin's word is duh LORE uh fyooj -- something that banishes or mitigates grief. It's on!
8:13am: 14/15 correct so far, and these are reasonably difficult words -- the most difficult so far being (IMHO) MEE ruhb -- the place in a mosque pointing you to Mecca. (And then, of course the next two spellers err.) (Adam)
8:27am: 32/36 correct so far. (Adam)
8:57am: 71/77 correct, including the "I hope you've seen this before" Weissnichtwo. Corollary and ibuprofen did cause some difficulty, but one speller's going to bring home a nice CHOHCH kee after today. (Adam)
10:00am: 126/137 through the first half of round two and the first six after the break have aced their words, so we're on a streak of 25 correct words right now. They're in a stretch of not-exactly-killer words -- simulacrum, wunderkind, fiduciary, exacerbate, paladin.
And then as soon as I was ready to publish, two of three Garden Staters erred -- gauche and dee fuhn BAHK ee uh -- "a small genus of tropical American erect plants (family Araceae) with long sheathing or clasping petioles and united stamens," named for Ernst dee fuhn BAHK. (Adam)
7:50 a.m., better coast: What subliminal messages are the Scripps powers sending with the innocuous-Wiccan-clairsentience-vituperative string? A message to our contestants: Use charms, talismans, spells, and incantations at will, but if you peek at the future for your answers, the bell will be a vengeful god. (Isaac)
8:39/11:39: Eric Xu spells for the News-Virginian and The Daily Progress. The News-Virginian is a regular newspaper. The Daily Progress is an 8.5x11" sheet taped to Eric Xu's refrigerator that tracks the status of the Xu family's weekly chores. This week, Eric's sister has double-duty of "unload dishwasher" and "take out recycling." Eric himself has a sole task: "win Bee." Scripps was unable to obtain a photograph of Eric Xu and instead is using a file photograph of Energy Secretary Steven Chu. (Isaac)
8:43/11:43: On the one hand, Ian Fraser is out. On the other hand, he is sixty years old and writes for the New Yorker, so I'm not sure how he finagled his way in anyway. (Isaac)
The curse of Afrikaans words -- FORE treh kehr just waylayed a kid.
ReplyDeleteWow. Veronica Penny looked petrified on fauntleroy, but pulled it out.
ReplyDeleteAnd there are much harder Afrikaans words than voortrekker - bokmakierie, for instance.
ReplyDeleteWhen a kid spells Schadenfreude correctly and it makes you feel good, how do you describe that sensation?
ReplyDeleteThe much-ballyhooed Illinois contingent went perfect in round two.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that they've pulled out some decent sized guns against the kids in this round. Hasn't it been pretty typical that this round is fairly easy, so that every kid gets a chance to spell one word correctly in front of the cameras?
ReplyDeleteThis is about on pace with last year's second round, when they did ramp up the difficulty for this round.
ReplyDeleteOuch. Speller from Maryland spins the DRAY duhl and gets nun.
ReplyDeleteJust logging on to ESPN3 now. Are we between preliminary rounds, or just on a break?
ReplyDeleteMid-round break. Back at 10am I think.
ReplyDeleteKiwi alert!
ReplyDeleteRound 2 has fairly difficult words, but many are familiar to spellers who have studied the Consolidated Word list. I see many words of Latin and French origins, which is to be expected.
ReplyDeleteD.C. represent! I sang a verse of Schadenfreude for Donovan Jordan.
ReplyDeletePerhaps Freudefreude? (joy-joy instead of harm-joy)
Wikipedia says "The <span>Buddhist</span> concept of <span>mudita</span>, "sympathetic joy" or "happiness in another's good fortune", is cited as an example of the opposite of schadenfreude."
ReplyDeleteThe Latin/French/Greek roots is fine; what seems less easy (to an outsider) is the "the name is dervied from an obscure German scientist" or "it's from this 19th Century novel" roots where there's no great way to reason it out.
ReplyDeleteJoseph Cusi Delamerced will be baahhhk, after spelling sigh-behr-NEH-tics
ReplyDeleteThat's true. Eponyms are tricky, as are the Afrikaans & Dutch. Spellers are doing great though. Round two is going strong.
ReplyDeleteAnd the food words strike again, with quenelle, witloof (new to me - the Belgian name for Belgian endive), croustade, mozzarella, and schnecke tripping up spellers. But pistou, prosciutto, escarole, basmati, posset, kielbasa, and comestibles were all surmounted
ReplyDeleteAlso plants: dieffenbachia and sanicle were treacherous, but bromeliad and zinnia were safer.
Legal terms were less dangerous: usufructuary, replevin, embracery, and fiduciary were all correct, with only ultimogeniture proving difficult.
Since I went to high school with Megan and Matt Diefenbach, I definitely would have missed the extra "f" there.
ReplyDeletePennsylvania was perfect in this round!
ReplyDeleteTahini, croissant, boniato, madeleine all left a good taste in the mouth; turbinado was not sweet.
ReplyDeleteEven though The Secret Garden and A Little Princess are still quite popular, Little Lord Fauntleroy (the book Frances Hodgson Burnett was best known for, in its day) is not. I could barely get through it, myself, and I only tried because I love the other two.
ReplyDeleteWow, hierarchy and hieroglyphics back to back? What are the odds of that?
ReplyDeleteBack in 2007, <span>pappardelle was on the Championship Words List. This year, round two, and spelled incorrectly.</span>
ReplyDelete1/676, assuming that the words given are pure randomly generated letters.
ReplyDeleteGnathonic was on the Championship Word List in 2003. Evelyn Blacklock (whose brother Gabriel is in this year's bee) missed it.
ReplyDeletePappardelle trips up a speller with its long, delicate ribbons. Einkorn and plantain were spelled correctly, and would probably taste good together.
ReplyDeleteWow. 6/7 mistakes down the back stretch between Texas/USVI/Utah, and not on the easiest set of words either (save proboscis, IMHO).
ReplyDeleteI was impressed that Jessica Pena of Ghana got Baedecker right. I wouldn't know it without A Room With a View ("And no, you are not, not, not to look at your Baedecker, Miss Honeychurch.")
ReplyDeleteArgh. Baedeker, not Baedecker.
ReplyDeleteDr. Larrabee would not approve.
ReplyDeleteRemember that these two preliminary rounds consist of words that the spellers had in advance. The SpellIt (about 1000 words) plus some additional list given to these spellers a month or two ago.
ReplyDeletePappardelle is a championship word if it was just one of 10,000-100,000 words to study, but not if it was on a list of 1,000-2,000 words to study in advance.
I wish I could take today off completely! Ah, life. Round 2 is comprised of words from the Spell It! study guide and the Sponsor Bee Guide and you can play along here as many of the words given today are pronounced: http://www.spellingbee.com/students-parents The bee even writes in their Bee Week Guide that this is the one round in the bee for which you are given the entire word list. In other words, you have no excuses in this round.
ReplyDeleteJust some gratuitous commentary here but I hate the name Spell It! It makes me think of some angry, overly-invested parent threatening a kid to "Spell It!" or else he or she will not be allowed to go to the mall or on the internet or to eat dinner. I saw the word "comminution" and had a flashback to when I misspelled "commination" in the 1998 national finals. It is often the deceptively simple-sounding and simply spelled words that mess with spellers' brains much more than the weissnichtwos and febrifugals on the word list. This crowd is probably aware of this already. Also, the only word I saw in that back stretch of mistakes that I think is cruel no matter how many times you've studied it is keest. Ack, that "ei" sound when it's spelled "ee."
I think I'm going to buy the kid who spelled 'tchotchke' a copy of Office Space.
ReplyDeleteAnd wait, Ghana sends spellers now? I'm sort of sad the Kiwi was eliminated. I have a soft spot for New Zealand.
With their "tays" instead of "tee's" and their "zeds" instead of "zee's." At least we have the Canadians left for the zeds. :)
ReplyDelete