The art of spellinqq corectly

Let me take this opportunity to come out of the closet. Or, in this case, the dictionary. You see, I’m a devotee of the written and spoken word, a lover of semantics and the lexeme. I enjoy using words like “obfuscate” in order to, well, obfuscate people. My life goal is to become a seasoned, ardent sesquipedalian, but never to the point of logorrhea.

Still, amid all the esoteric word-worship, one truth glares at me with the force of the YouTube dramatic chipmunk. If I were quizzed on these words I so adore, I doubt I would be able to spell half correctly. However, I’m not worried. My orthography matters to me about as much as watching the next “Twilight” movie (that is to say, not very much).

I’m not alone here. We live in a world where correct spelling, though commendable, seems almost trivial. This is a world where we shorten our thoughts to acronyms—LOL, OMG, STFU. This is a world we spell incorrectly—on purpose. Some of us start our online chats with an effervescent “hai gaise!!!” rather than the same expression spelled correctly. Some of us change the letter “g” in words to “q” or “qq.” A Twitter user tweeted a particularly fine example of this phenomenon: “Omq im so freakinqq bored :/ somebody text me somethinqq sweet ((: qood morninqq beautiful babies.” The effect of this impeccable g to qq transition, lackadaisical yet sparkling, is almost as fantastic as my other favorite linguistic movement, the “ex” to “sex” revolution, which is both sexcellent and sexhilarating.

Faced with the increasing prevalence of internet-speak, we shorten, embellish and adapt our language, trying to increase its efficiency through space and time. As a result, the spoken and written word veer into abstraction. Meaning and effect become more important than words themselves, and proper spelling—god forbid—ceases to be a fixed property of a word. Spelling becomes a sort of finishing touch, one that we can play with or simply ignore—and correct spelling is no longer necessary.

Yet last week I was reminded that spelling correctly was not a lost art, at least to a group of intelligent, devoted kids, all 14 years old or younger. The 2011 Scripps National Spelling Bee finals took place last Thursday, June 2. In case you were watching game two of the NBA Finals (sports conflict!), where the Dallas Mavericks, led by Dirk Nowitzki, made a spectacular 22-5 run in the fourth quarter to beat the Miami Heat, you might have missed it, although it happened to be just as spectacular. The semifinals of the event ran throughout the day, whittling more than 200 competitors down to 13. The competition was cutthroat, but eventually Sukanya Roy—an eighth grader from the Scranton, Pa., area—emerged as victor, correctly spelling “cymotrichous,” which means “wavy hair.” Her winnings are valued at around $40,000. Not too shabby.

Let’s take a closer look at the final 10 words the participants had to spell, from the 10th to the winning word: lekane, panguingue, Jugendstil, galoubet, naumkeag, hooroosh, orgeat, sorites, periscii and finally, cymotrichous.

Yikes. Recognize any of these? Think you can spell any of them correctly? If you can’t, it’s OK. Apparently, Microsoft Word can’t define or spell them either; none of the words pass Word’s spell-checker. For my part, it’s ironic that the only thought that came to my mind, after hearing each word, wasn’t even a word—just a simple, unadulterated “WTF?” It would seem that these 10 words veer into abstraction as much as “good morninqq.” I tried an example—when I searched for “lekane” in Google, I was asked if I had, in fact, meant “alkane”. Fairly certain “lekane” did not signify a saturated hydrocarbon containing no rings or pi bonds, I turned to Wordnik, the only free online dictionary containing the word (note: Merriam-Webster demands pay now; my heart is broken). A “lekane” is “a covered pottery vessel in the form of a tureen, with two handles, sometimes used as a basket or box.” Cool! Actually, for all its attempts to hide from online dictionaries, masquerading as alkane, lekane was spelled correctly in competition. In fact, out of those 10 ridiculous words that put my sesquipedalian aspirations to shame, only three were spelled incorrectly: “Jugendstil,” “galoubet” and “sorites.”

Yet Sukanya Roy managed to spell all of them correctly, furthering a streak of Indian-American spelling bee winners (props to the motherland) to nine since 1999, when Nupur Lala won with “logorrhea” (the only word here which I can spell correctly). Roy did what no one else at the bee could do, and what most of the English-speaking population of this world (myself included) could never do—spelled every word thrown at her correctly, on purpose. In the end, glowing, gloriously victorious, she could only say one thing about how she felt—“It’s hard to find the words.” She could, however, probably spell them. For Sukanya Roy, the lost art of spelling correctly proved to be the best thing in the world—not lost at all.