Way to Bee!

Just a quick shout out to Katharine Close, the 13-year-old that won the 2006 Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington D.C. last night, AND…she’s from Spring Lake, NEW JERSEY! Hooray!!! This was the first time ever that the national spelling bee was aired live on network television, and it made for a really eventful Thursday evening with my girlfriend and her parents.

The final two were Katharine Close from NJ and Finola Hackett of Alberta, Canada…yeah, Canada. Kind of weird that kids from Canada are in our NATIONAL spelling bee, but I guess not when you consider how much overlap there is between the US and Canada in other areas, like professional sports. It was actually intense, considering they went so many round that the “25 Championship Words” Round went into effect, which basically meant that the girls would go back and forth until either there was a winner or they finished all 25 words, in which case they would be co-champions. With less than 10 words left, Finola goofed on “weltschmerz”, spelling it with a ‘v’ instead of a ‘w’ (which is kind of weird considering they study the origins of words and, knowing the origin is German, I think it’s standard for the German ‘v’ sound to be spelled with a ‘w’). This was Katharine’s chance...she’d have to spell the next two words correctly in order to win (one word for the round Finola messed up in, and another word for a new round)…and she did! First came “kundalini”, which was no problem. Then, the final word: “ursprache”, which means “a language that is the recorded or hypothetical ancestor of another language or group of languages”. You could tell right away that she knew it, but she stayed cool, asked a couple questions about the word, and then spelled her way into the 2006 Championship! Good stuff…

~Congratulations From All of Us Here at Funny Because It’s True~

(…and by “All of Us” I mean just me, CJ…)