The Spelling Bee

OK, I didn't take this picture. But my camera did (with Brad's help).

Friday night we were in the Guilford Spelling Bee ("we" being our neighbor Maria, Amy, and me).

It was quite fun. The high school auditorium was packed. All spelling teams were encouraged to wear costumes. We were channeling our inner dog (our group name was "3 Dog Night").

There were about 50 teams; we were in the third heat. We spent the first two heats practicing our teamwork -- we would hear the word being announced and scramble to put our various ideas together and come to consensus within the 30 seconds allowed.

In the first heat, practicing, we got audition, nougat, excoriate, and wherry right. We got rescission wrong, forgetting the relationship to rescind and leaving out the s.

In the second heat, we corrected each other enough to get humorous, satellite, treacherous, chauvinism, Machiavellian, rottweiler, recidivist, propitious, ratatouille, and gallimaufry right (!!). We got echidna and lacustrine wrong, but so did everyone else in that round. We could have done pretty well in the second heat.

Then came our heat. We were introduced, and barked (the emcee was rather snarky about that). We got temporary right, and barked. Maintenance, barked.

Then the emcee announced a word that means a kind of Caribbean dance, that sounded like "goombay." We had complete consensus -- none of us had a clue. We wrote down six spellings and picked one that looked a little French - "goumbe." It was wrong. The correct spelling (3 teams got it right) was... goombay.

So, we lost in our heat, and didn't make the finals. But we had a lot of fun, helped raise money for the Guilford Fund For Education, and we collaborated together very nicely. Isn't that a kind of victory?

By the way, our friend Linda Waldman was a player in one of the last two teams left in the competition. They lost on quiddity. (The dictionary's first definition is basically "The this-ness (quid-ness) of a thing -- its essence." The second definition, more delightfully, is "a trifling nicety of subtle distinction.") As Linda later said, "What kind of crazy word is that ???"