Ambush of Foreign Words at National Spelling Bee

Fourteen-year-old Snigdha Nandipat eluded the guetapens laid by the canities at the Scripps National Spelling Bee as one challenger lost himself in the high vetiver, another came in one Heath bar short of an ericeticolous ending, and the final challenger fell to insufficient schwarmerei for the geistlich unabridged dictionaries that grow like schwannoma on this annual porwigle ridotto.

Round	Contestant	Correct/Incorrect spelling	Meaning	Language
13	Snigdha Nandipati San Diego, California	guetapens guetapens	ambush, snare, trap	French
12	Stuti Mishra West Melbourne, Florida	schwarmerei schwermerei	unwholesome obsession	German
10	Arvind Mahankali Bayside Hills, New York	schwannoma schvonoma	a specific cancer tumor	German
9	Gifton Wright Spanish Town, Jamaica	ericeticolous erosoticolous	living in a heath habitat	Latin
9	Nicholas Rushlow Pickerington, Ohio	vetiver vetover	an Indian grass or its root	French from Tamil
9	Lena Greenberg Philadelphia, Pennsylvania	geistlich geistleich	religious, spiritual, sacred	German
8	Frank Cahill Parker, Colorado	porwigle porwiggle	tadpole, pollywog	Middle English
7	Jordan Hoffman Lee's Summit, Missouri	canities conities	graying or whitening of hair	Latin
7	Emma Ciereszynski Dover, New Hampshire	ridotto redatto	retreat, place of entertainment	Italian

To force the kids to compete on putatively English words gleaned from foreign and medical dictionaries seems pointless. It seems to me you want your National Spelling Bee champion to win on a good old American word, like incisor (1975) or narcolepsy (1976). In recent years, the contest has been buried alive in an endless stream of obscure words, a vivisepulture (1996) of logorrhea (1999).

I'd be hard pressed to tell you what any of these winning words from 2001-2011 mean without looking them up: succedaneum, prospicience, pococurante, autochthonous, appoggiatura, Ursprache, serrefine, guerdon, Laodicean, stromuhr, and cymotrichous.

If the idea is to introduce American kids to a better appreciation of foreign culture, I'd suggest that next year they simply have the contestants spell each other's names.

It's fun to watch the kids take on the supposed spelling masters, the adults rolling words they've likely never seen before in practiced sentences designed to make the master seem clever. And when the kids ask for the language of derivation, you can tell they don't always buy the pretense that the word has become English.