Jennifer Hurley’s eyes lit up when she heard announcer Irwin Cantor say rallentando, a gradually slackening musical tempo. She quickly stepped back to the microphone and without hesitation spelled the word correctly to become the 1987 Memphis-Shelby County Spelling Bee champion on March 21, 1987.(Photo: Thomas Busler, The Commercial Appeal)Buy Photo
This year, for the first time in what feels like a millennium (a word with two L’s and two N’s, don’t forget), I will not spend a Saturday watching Memphis and Mid-South children of all shapes and sizes step to a microphone on a public stage and enunciate letters of the Roman alphabet in order to construct words that in many cases — rhododendron, ichthyosaurus — seemed longer than the spellers themselves.
That’s because, this year, there is no Greater Memphis or Shelby County spelling bee.
As a result, I will not be a spelling bee judge for the first time in at least 15 years.
I will not hear the plaintive questions “Can you use that in a sentence?” and “Are there any homonyms?”
My nerves will not be wracked — excuse me, racked — by the spellers’ contagious nervousness; by the occasionally interminable between-letter pauses that dilated time with an Einsteinian insistence; by the responsibility of deciphering the sometimes all but impenetrable accents and lisps; by the awkward yet too-cute-to-bear middle-school extremes between Brobdingnagian girls and Lilliputian late-blooming boys; and by the heartbreaks of orthographic missteps so self-evident that even the speller appeared shocked, as if he or she had stepped on a tack.
Most refreshing of all, I will not be expected to shatter the tense post-spelled-word silence by ringing the tabletop tocsin — or bell — that signals that a speller has confused dragoons with dragons or gauss with gas and has been, as Chuck Barris would say, gonged.
I’m not joking when I say it is refreshing to miss a year as the spelling bee’s Quasimodo of bad news, the Chief Judge — the bell-ringer who ultimately gives the clangorous hook to every speller onstage with the exception of the winner.
That duty aside, I miss the bee, and I join those journalists, educators, spellers and others who think it’s a shame that Memphis this year lost the event due to what a word-studier might term corporate pretermission.
In fact, the cringe-inducing moments enumerated above were inconsequential indeed compared to the overall excitement of the bees. Without fail, each of these spelling contests delivered the suspense of a Hitchcock film, the unpredictability of an NCAA tournament game, the entertainment value of a Merrie Melodies marathon, and a cast of charming, eccentric and unusual kids that would be the envy of Hal Roach, “Fat Albert,” Charles M. Schulz and “Children of the Corn.”
If nothing else, the bee was catnip for a blatherskite. Although I have had little opportunity to use them, such terms as myrmidon (an unscrupulous subordinate), gynarchy (rule by women) and flense (to slice skin or fat from a carcass) have a definite appeal.
For decades, the bee was sponsored and organized by The Commercial Appeal (with former employee Mary Lou Brown acting as Queen Bee, so to speak, for many of those years). This arrangement made sense, because words to a newspaper are like grass to a lawn.
But during the complicated ownership transition from Scripps to the Journal Media Group to Gannett, the local bee — part of the network that led to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington — lost the coordination of The Commercial Appeal, and no other company or entity was able to step forward and take over the event in the time available.
As a result, the March 10 regional spelling bee in Nashville is the closest contest available for spellers who hope to compete in the 91st Scripps national bee in May in Washington. That’s tough on Memphis-area spellers, but the good news is that the University of Memphis will partner with the bee’s Nashville sponsors, the Tennessee Titans, to bring the event back to Memphis in 2019, according to U of M president David Rudd.
I hope that plan comes to fruition, because spelling, like a lot of so-called norms, is under attack. In fact, for fans of grammar and correct spelling, the past year has been one of unpropitious, conspicuous, excruciating and pestiferous atrocity (to use five words from this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee Vocabulary List).
We have a President who Tweets “payed” for paid, “dieing” for dying, “tapp” for tap, “honered” for honored, “unpresidented” for unprecedented and “Barrack” for Barack Obama. Plus, “covfefe.” It’s enough to drive a conscientious speller to drinck.
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