You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. This entry was posted on at 6:53 pm and is filed under Language and ethnicity, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Spelling. From my 6/24/16 posting “Bob Eckstein”, space aliens at a spelling bee (#4 there): #1 isn’t Bob’s first foray into spelling-bee cartooning. PALAMA is probably the best guess - but this is a spelling bee, where exotic spellings abound, so the most likely spelling is probably not the right one. Given the pronunciation /ˈpaləmə/ for ‘the webbing on the feet of aquatic birds’, there are a fair number of possible spellings, most prominently the 24 spellings PALxMA, PALxMMA, POLLxMA, POLLxMMA, where x is one of the vowel spellings A, E, I, O, U, Y. Of course, at the top levels, spelling bees rely on extremely rare words (I know bougainvillea only because I’m a gardener in coastal California I’ve grown the plant on my patio, and there are several of the vines now blooming showily within a block of my house.)Īnd there’s a challenge only because English spelling has so many alternative spellings for particular sounds, especially because it has borrowed spellings from other languages. The remaining four - pendeloque, palama, cernuous, odylic - I’m completely unfamiliar with. One more - aiguillette - I believe I’ve seen in print, but I’m hazy on the meaning. Of the eight words in the last round, one - bougainvillea - I use with modest frequency, and two - auslaut and erysipelas - I recall having encountered, and know what they mean. In this year’s winning cohort, one is 12, six are 13, and one is 14. Note on ages: the eligibility requirements are moderately complex, but there’s no minimum age, and no one 15 or older is eligible most competitors are 13. As this year’s competitors themselves said, they were competing against the dictionary, not each other. Spelling bees are a form of competitive language play - a competition in which the contestants compete in reaching some criterion of performance (as in competitive diving), rather than a racing competition (as in swimming races) or a competition framed as combat (as in chess or most team sports). On the format for spelling bees, see the discussion following cartoon #5 in my 3/19/19 posting “Le retour des hiéroglyphes”. (This is, of course, a cultural, not genetic, phenomenon - but certainly worth some reflection.) In fact, 7 of the 8 winners are of Indian descent. Note that Bob has chosen to represent two of the four contestants in his cartoon as adolescents of color. Story in the New York Times today, “National Spelling Bee, at a Loss for Words, Crowns 8 Co-Champions” (octo-champs, as one of them said) by Daniel Victor. (#1) FB note from Bob: “Can you use it in a sentence?” A Bob Eckstein cartoon circulated today, on the occasion of an unprecedented event in the world of English spelling competitions:
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