Spelling Bee Pt. 5 - The Finals!
Well, it happened! The 2021 National Spelling Bee came to a close on Thursday night. As I’m sure you’ve all heard by now, our champion was: Zaila Avant-garde!!!
Zaila had been one of my faves since the Quarterfinals, and now the world loves her too. She wants to be an astronaut/archaeologist/WNBA player when she grows up, and she already has THREE Guinness World Records in…basketball juggling?!
She was the first winner from Louisiana, the first homeschooled winner since 2000, and the FIRST Black American winner!! (Second Black winner ever, after Jody-Anne Maxwell from Jamaica won in 1998). Zaila is obviously going on to do great things. What an absolute champ. Here’s the New York Times’ write up of the evening, and here’s mine:
The Format
The Finals included Rounds 10-18, all spelling rounds except for one word meaning round (#11). The night moved pretty quickly!
Round 10: 11 spellers entered the round, 5 were eliminated, 6 advanced.
Round 11: all 6 spellers survived the word meaning round!
Round 12: 6 spellers entered the round, 3 were eliminated, 3 advanced.
Round 13: all 3 continued on!
Round 14: 1 speller (Bhavana) was eliminated, we were down to the final 2!
Rounds 15 and 16: the final 2 spelled correctly
Round 17: Chaitra spelled incorrectly, Zaila spelled correctly
Round 18: Zaila correctly spelled the winning word!!!!
The Words
You know what, I’m just going to tell you all of them! There weren’t that many:
trophallactic, phylloxera, trochiline, platylepadid, gewgaw, rolamite, archedictyon, euxinic, torticollis, heliconius, Shedu, bacrachian, aphyllous, dysphotic, saxicolous, nematode, bathyal, ambystoma, theodolite, ancistroid, chrysal, cloxacillin, regolith, psychogogic, duchesse, thanatophidia, athanor, depreter, consertal, fidibus, haltere, Nepeta, fewtrils, retene, neroli oil annnnnd….…Murraya
The only word that I thought was too easy was nematode in the vocabulary round, which my cousin Nikki pointed out is from Spongebob
I thought all of the words were hard, but chrysal (which tripped up sweet young Vivinsha) was particularly difficult because it had an unknown origin! You could have spelled it so many ways!! Vivinsha went with cristle, a solid guess.
The Scandals
Roy Seligman from the Bahamas spelled ambystoma with an i instead of a y. Mary (the judge who says “that’s correct!” if the kid spells right and rings a bell if they’re wrong) told Roy “that’s correct!” But it wasn’t!! This triggered an excruciatingly long review where they replayed him spelling the word wrong like three times, and then he was called back on stage where they rang they bell and told him he was eliminated. Probably the most uncomfortable way to go! Sean and I were not fans of Mary throughout previous rounds (she gave really dry and insincere sounding pep talks each time a kid got kicked out), and this solidified our grudge. Poor Roy.
The Kids
Second place went to Chaitra Thummala, who had two really cute younger siblings cheering her on! She was a super fast speller, which made me nervous.
And third place was Bhavana Madini, whose parents promised her she could get a dog if she placed in the top 5. Mission accomplished! She’s going to get a white Maltese named Joy.
Okay! Thanks for joining me through this year’s Spelling Bee content!
A question for you all: what are you doing for the Olympics? I have been waffling. I was originally feeling kind of indifferent, but then after watching some Track and Field trials I decided I wanted to get VERY into it and made a complicated spreadsheet of all the events I wanted to watch, but then various Olympic committees have just completely fucked over Black women in multiple infuriating ways, AND don’t get me started on if these games should even be happening this year at all!! So. What should I do? What are you doing? I do realize that there’s plenty of ground between making the Olympics my entire identity for a full month and a complete boycott, so maybe I’ll land somewhere in there. Opening ceremonies, women’s gymnastics, skateboarding, maybe some beach volleyball. I don’t know. Please help me!!
Regular newsletter content will return next week!
xoxo
Ali