6/1/2022 - Spelling Bee Pt. 1
Hello! Welcome to Bee Week! The Preliminaries aired from 8am-6pm yesterday, followed by the Quarterfinals this morning from 7am-9am. If you haven’t been glued to your television/my instagram story, here’s what you may have missed:
The Format
In the Prelims, each kid took the stage one at a time, and went through up to three rounds in a row while they were up there. First round was a spelling word, second round was a multiple choice word definition question, then the third round was a spelling word again.
I do not like the word definition rounds! I don’t think vocabulary is the same thing as spelling! It makes me so mad when a kid deftly spells a killer word in round one, only to be immediately crushed by not knowing what sciatica means in round two.
The Quarterfinals began (and ended!) with round four, a spelling word. After the end of the round, the spellers had been whittled down to an acceptable number for the Semifinals, so they wrapped things up almost three hours earlier than planned! Are the kids worse this year? Are the words harder? Are the producers bad at estimating times! Who can never be sure.
Here’s the breakdown of how things progressed:
Preliminaries:
Round 1: 229 spellers entered the round, 72 were eliminated
Round 2: 162 spellers entered the round, 28 were eliminated
Round 3: 134 spellers entered the round, 46 were eliminated
Quarterfinals:
Round 4: 88 spellers entered the round, 40 were eliminated
48 spellers advanced to the Semifinals
2021 Bee:
Comparatively, the Preliminaries last year started with 209 kids, and 72 moved on to the Quarterfinals. From there, it took three full rounds before they called it a day and moved on to Semifinals.
Round 4: 75 spellers entered the round, 17 were eliminated
Round 5: 58 spellers entered the round, 16 were eliminated
Round 6: 42 spellers entered the round, 12 were eliminated
30 spellers advanced to the Semifinals
I guess I’m surprised the Semifinals are so much larger this year compared to last year? I don’t question the Bee producers though, even if they work in mysterious ways.
The Words
Words I thought were too easy:
facile (no pun intended)
lefse
Bavarian cream
ganache
ennui
ficus
currant
trilobite
Words I thought were too hard:
lachsschinken
sangfroid (the kid and the judge repeated this back and forth to each other like 20 times in increasingly strained French accents)
zabaglione
loess (this word had like five pronunciations, and they all sounded like Coach Z)
Some other interesting words:
kobold, the D&D monster
dirigible the adjective, meaning “able to be steered”
grissino, a breadstick
cabette, a female taxi cab driver
saponifiable, able to be made into soap
The Scandals
Best part of the Preliminaries was when Speller #56 (Annie-Lois Acheampong, one of the three spellers from Ghana this year) breezed through coulrophobia (fear of clowns) and was then given edamame as her vocabulary word. Suddenly she gasped and said “I’m going to pee my pants!” I thought this meant that she was excited because she knew what edamame meant, and there was some good natured chuckling from the judges, but then she said “No I really have to pee, can I go?” and ran off the stage!! No one knew what to do! There were a few minutes of awkward silence, and then they moved on to the next speller. Annie-Lois got to come back at the end of the day to try again; she correctly defined nutation (a motion of the earth's axis like the nodding of a top) but then spelled apery (the act of imitation) wrong. Annie-Lois, I’m proud of you for speaking up for your needs. May it take you far in life!
The other scandal is that they’re still letting Mary Banks ring the bell when someone gets a word wrong, or say “that’s correct!” when they get it right. After what she did to Roy Seligman last year, I’m surprised she’s still showing her face in public!! Even worse, she’s back on her terrible post-elimination pep talk shit, saying things like “Sahil, I know you said Ryan Reynolds is your favorite actor because he’s so successful, but I’m sure if he was watching this he’d think you were successful.” It’s so embarrassing!! Get her out of there!
The Spellers
I’m sure you’re dying to know who I’m cheering for! Or maybe you’re more interested in finding out which children I hate. I’ll tell you some of both:
I admire speller #23, Noemie Jackson-Weaver, for asking for “all the word information except the sentence,” because we all know the sentences are silly distractions!
Rooting big time for speller #130, Jianna Marina, because her favorite musician is Mitski and anyone with such emotionally devastating taste in music (myself very much included) deserves a win
There is a kid in this competition named Zain Malik lmao (relatedly, please contact me if you want to talk shit about Liam Payne today)
My absolute least favorite guy this year is speller #160, Chris Dominick, because he keeps ad libbing dramatically quippy jokes and cringey hand gestures before and after he spells. This is technically his time to shine, sure, but oof is it annoying.
And my favorite this year is speller #152, our good old friend Vivinsha from last year! She ended up in 4th place in 2021, and I’d really like to see her win it all this time. She continues to be both a ray of sunshine and also a genius.
Semifinals air tonight from 7-9pm (they’re actually happening LIVE right now, but I’m not watching because I’ve had my viewing scheduled meticulously planned for weeks and I refuse to change!)
Finals are tomorrow night (Thursday, June 2) also from 7-9pm. Who will win, who will…die? Or maybe it’s just an exchange of technology and culture and everybody wins. See you on Friday for a final recap after the dust settles!
x-o-x-o,
Ali