Cigarrette? WRONG!
Your English Skills: |
| Grammar: 100% |
| Punctuation: 100% |
| Spelling: 100% |
| Vocabulary: 100% |
I must have gotten nervous; I threw out an extra “R” for some reason, and that immediately disqualified me…
Today, I went to Long Beach for the inaugural Adult Spelling Bee.
Because of my passion for spelling, and the need to get away from my computer for a while, I wanted to enter this competition to see if I still had it in me.
Out of the original 29 or so contestants, I made it through some thirty-five rounds, and down to the last four standing, when my word was “cigarette”. WHY did I pronounce a second “R” in there? According to the rules, which are based on the same rules used in the National Spelling Bee in Washington D.C., once you have recited letters leading to a complete spelling, you can only reiterate, but not retract them. I successfully spelled the stupid word after stopping on that infernal second “R”, and backtracking; but it was too late!
Maybe I was thinking about actually having a cigarette! Nasty habit! It made me drop out of the competition! I took a seat out in the pews of the church, and got my pad and pen out to jot down the next words being pronounced. I was successful in correctly recording about 99% of the subsequent 85 or so words posed to the remaining contestants.
Kate was the last one standing, after the guy before her fouled up on “medieval”. Kate successfully spelled “parallelogram” and won the competition!
I learned a couple of new words today: exegesis and doula; and I was reminded of the correct spelling of about four words. I didn’t remember that there were three C’s in “cappuccino”, for example.
A fun time was had by all, and afterward, I went to have coffee with Kate and Kathy, and Justin and Ralph (the coordinators of the event), and I made some new friends.
