The Boss of the Bee: Me again as Word Master

(688 words)

The nearest exit was blocked by three 8-year-old girls who at the moment were all bawling their eyes out.

Exit no. 2 was crowded with chairs, children and the folding table packed with all the gift baskets.

That meant the least obstructed way out was to leap straight off the stage and dash down the middle aisle of the Greensburg Salem Middle School auditorium and just pray I could dodge the 80 or so parents and supporters who would, I was certain, descend en masse and hold me until the cops showed up.

It was the 9th annual Greensburg Rotary Spelling Bee. I was again word master and the situation was on the verge of unraveling.

We were down to just two students — two darling girls — and neither could spell the two words in a row required to declare a victor.

The first girl would correctly spell mesa, but then flub xylophone. Then the next girl would nail pigeon, but stumble over hieroglyphics.

It went on like that for 20 minutes. It looked like it might never end. The words were only getting more difficult.

Rhombus, ventriloquist, terrestrial, handkerchief  … the girls were taking turns misspelling the clinchers.

Unless you’ve been, you have no idea how nerve-wracking a competitive spelling bee among elementary children is. I’ve been to many less compelling NFL games.

The children are so precious. They’ve studied so hard. They are eager to do well.

And when they misspell aorta, it looks like theirs is going to rupture right there on stage.

This was the second year they’d asked me to be word master and it looks like the gig is mine until I show up drunk and for fun start asking the little 3rd graders to spell words like poopy or fart.

I learned last night my predecessor had been a prominent female broadcaster who fell out of favor when she gave into the temptation show off.

I’m not saying she was Diane Sawyer, but she acted like she was Diane Sawyer.

“It was unbelievable,” a judge told me. “When she told one kid to spell tsunami, she said, ‘The Japanese pronounce the word Ta-SU-ne-MAY.’ Geez, these kids don’t care about Japanese pronunciations.”

I told her that would never happen with me.

I despise psilent letters.

What did worry me was a crying kid could shatter my reserve and I’d be forced to act like a caring human being.

We know how that can lead to trouble.

See, as word master, I’m a perfect cypher. I dress nice and have a pleasant smile the whole time, but show zero emotion. I’m like “Hunger Games” emcee Caesar Flickerman only with a mood-tempering hangover.

Last year, it took me a while to achieve this facade. I remember having to force myself not to silently mouth the correct letters to the boys. Sure, I understand the necessity of being impartial, but I’ll do whatever I can to help a kid from the home team win.

I really started getting nervous when three of the girls started to bawl.

Any misstep or misspeak on my part it could lead to controversy.

But I have a precious 8-year-old girl at home. She cries, too. And when she does, my instinct is drop whatever I’m doing, pick her up in my Daddy arms and squeeze until my shirt’s soaked up all the tears.

Imagine the scandal if I did that with some other Daddy’s daughter?

Can you spell molester?

I’d be dismissed from future word master duties for reasons more felonious than a pretentious pronunciation of Ta-SU-ne-MAY.

Happily, we soon declared a winner. The runner-up failed on the word strategy and the eventual winner brought home the trophy by correctly spelling first encyclopedia then quadrilateral.

It was all very impressive.

Even more impressive, I made it though the whole night without a single mispronunciation or flub. Parents and organizers said my enunciations were flawless and I’ll be welcomed back next year.

I went home without having caused any parental dismay or scandal.

And that to me spells relief.

Related . . .

What happened at last week’s spelling bee

Word Master: I’m the boss of the bee

An alphabetically-ordered world

Expense accounting the National Spelling Bee

Searching for Mr. Stupid

Chris Rodell: Word Master! I'm boss of the bee

(786 words)

The list was given to me in strictest confidence with explicit instructions not to share it with another soul.

Nuclear launch codes?

Nah, all 276 words to be used at the 3rd grade spelling bee tomorrow at Stanwood Elementary School near New Stanton in the Hempfield Area School District.

So just in case any elementary schoolers are reading today’s blog, I’ll not dare spill any of the test words.

But I will say this: I used six of them in the first four paragraphs — oops! I mean I used six of them in the first four “sentences.”

Why was I entrusted with the list?

Because I am a Word Master.

Hell, I am THE Word Master!

At least I will be tomorrow night to about three dozen 8-year-old spellers.

I was asked to perform the duty after a friendly organizer heard me speak at an area Rotary presentation. I think I impressed her when I didn’t stumble over three-syllable words like syllable.

She said it’ll be my job to read the words aloud and answer questions about usage, part of speech, etc.

Word Master.

Care to hear me use it in a sentence?

“Because Chris Rodell is now a certified Word Master, no one can make fun of him if he ever missspellz another word.”

Word Master. It has a faintly dominatrix connotation to it, don’t you think?

I wonder if I can get my wife to join me in a little Word Master role play. I can rattle off a sexy verb, define it, then just sit back and let the games begin. If I find the result unsatisfactory I can just reach over and ring a little bell — ding! — and she’ll run crying from the room.

Oh, lord, I hope none of the children cry. I’ll probably leap over the judge’s table and give the little weeper a great big consoling hug — and we all know what kind of trouble stranger adults can get into hugging children they’ve never met.

It’s just one of the ways that the evening will be fraught with peril for a guy like me. Worse is my propensity to be such a smart ass joker in these types of situations.

All the grown ups will be watching. Nerves will be on edge. The stifling room will be utterly still.

Can you think of a better time to rip a really good, loud fart?

Outside of a good buddy’s funeral, I can’t.

I’ll be disgraced, of course, but I know it’ll crack up at least half of the 3rd grader boys on stage and that reaction remains a strong motivator for guys like me.

One of our favorite family movies is “Akeelah and the Bee” about a wonderful inner city girl who overcomes challenging circumstances to become a national spelling champ. The 2006 flick is to spelling bee movies what “Searching for Bobby Fisher” is to chess movies, which is to chess movies what “Rocky” is to boxing movies.

So it’s really enjoyable, and about 100 times better than the recently released spelling bee movie, “Bad Words,” starring Jason Bateman. USA Today gave it “1/2 out of 4 stars,” which is what all movies get if the film stumbles through to the credits.

I sat there fidgeting thinking, man, I could do a spelling bee movie better than this.

Remember, I have a rich history with the Scripps National Spelling Bee, having twice been a chaperone for contestants (links below) and set still-standing records for outlandish expense account profligacy.

Even better, I last year authored history’s greatest grade school spelling bee joke. 

It started when I was helping our darling 7 year old with her spelling words. Test words included “took,” “play,” “jump,” “help,” etc.

Then I came to the simple word “rule.”

Here’s what happened:

I said, “Spell rule.”

Lucy said, “R-U-L-E.”

She’d spelled a word, but it sounded like she’d asked me a question. I said, “You know I’m not Ellie. Now spell rule.”

Some of you may have to read that part twice.

We went on like that for about 10 minutes, her getting increasingly agitated spelling “R-U-L-E” and me insisting I wasn’t Ellie and demanding she again spell “rule.”

So you get some sense of the minefield we’re about to enter.

There could be brawls, shin-kickings, hair-pulling and ear-bitings — and that’s just between me and the angry 3rd graders. Concerned parents will no doubt wade into the melee shouting in unison, “It’s go time!” 

It has all the ingredients of being first spelling bee to ever warrant pay-per-view cable interest.

Yes, me being Word Master might really spell trouble. 

Just don’t anyone go asking if my name’s Ellie.

Related . . .

Expense accounting the national spelling bee

An alphabetically-ordered world

Searching for Mr. Stupid

The Herman Cain Mutiny

A night out with all the groan-ups

Re-Run Sunday: Searching for Mr. Stupid

I normally try and dig a little deeper than six or so months ago for Re-Run Sunday consideration. But I saw a surge of readers to this previously unread post from November 2011, "Searching for Mr. Stupid." It's very odd. Certainly we can't be running short on stupid.

But it pleases me to have this one find an audience after it was ignored on its premiere so giving it a mulligan today seemed like an intelligent thing to do.

By now many of you are familiar with my pretentious affections for my online subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary.

At $275 a year, it’s a true extravagance for any writer who works in a room with two dictionaries (hard- and soft covered), a laptop dictionary and a smartphone with near-instant access to a cornucopia of murky definitions.

But none of them measure up to the granddaddy of them all. The typical hardcover dictionary has about 150,000 definitions. The OED has more than 600,000. It strives to list every single word ever uttered and, yeah, I checked off all the Hall of Fame profanities the very first day.

I read it the way other people read Agatha Christie mysteries. I want to learn who done it. How words became words. And when they became words.

The dictionary lists as precisely as possible when a word became widespread enough for inclusion.

That’s how I became acquainted with the history of stupid.

According to the OED, stupid is only 470 years old. I thought stupidity was as old as Adam.

Check out the sentence used in 1541 to inaugurate stupid, attributed to a Mr. R. Copland who included the word in his book, “Galen’s Fourth Terapeutyk: “For the fyrste speake ouer lyghtly and to imprudently, and the other are all togyther stupydes, sturdy, & lytygious.”

Inserting that sentence into my otherwise pristine copy nearly caused my laptop spell checker to explode. The 19-word sentence includes seven modern misspellings.

Maybe Mr. R. Copland was stupid.

I was hoping stupid was an eponym -- a name derived from a person. Then I could learn more about Mr. Stupid. In fact, it might have inspired me to write a dandy History Channel documentary, “A Man Named Stupid.”

Here’s a factoid to brighten your day: money was named for Thomas le Mony who lived way back in the 13th century, when it must have cost, gee, one egg to fill up your whole tank.

So money was in effect coined for Mony. How rich!

Assuming he was generous it would have been good to have been neighbors with Mony, at least until the 99 percent showed up to occupy and crap all over his yard.

Words spelled by smart people were what led me to look up stupid.

In this November 8 post about Herman Cain’s follies, I wrote about the times when my old newspaper asked me to chaperone spelling bee contestants to the National Spelling Bee in Washington. I needed some examples of winning words and found a list of every winner since it all BEE-gan back in 1925.

Recent winning words include “cymotrichous” and “stromuhr,” examples too obscure and frightening for even word nerds like me to look up.

But what most struck me about the list was the steep increase in the degree of difficulty of winning words over the past 86 years.

Early winners were “fracas,” “interning,” “therapy,” and “initials.”

Can you believe it?

Turns out The Greatest Generation had weak vocabularies.

In fact, I’ve seen “fracas” on my daughter’s 5th grade spelling tests.

Guaranteed, there’s no way our nation’s best spellers from past decades could have conquered “rageshree,” “ramachandran,” “pratyush,” or “shivashankar.”

Don’t beat yourself up if those four mentions leave you scratching your head. They’re not spelling bee words. Those are actual names of some recent winners.

Kids named Bob Smith or Sue Miller have been getting drummed out in the early rounds.

So, speaking of Mony, it’s another day, another dollar here in Blogland.

I wonder if by spending my time doing things like this will one day lead to my name being included for posterity in some prominent dictionary.

“rodell, v., U.S.A., 2011: A nonsensical use of time. Example: “I rodelled the whole day away looking up stupid things in the dictionary.”

Searching for Mr. Stupid

By now many of you are familiar with my pretentious affections for my online subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary.

At $275 a year, it’s a true extravagance for any writer who works in a room with two dictionaries (hard- and soft covered), a laptop dictionary and a smartphone with near-instant access to a cornucopia of murky definitions.

But none of them measure up to the granddaddy of them all. The typical hardcover dictionary has about 150,000 definitions. The OED has more than 600,000. It strives to list every single word ever uttered and, yeah, I checked off all the Hall of Fame profanities the very first day.

I read it the way other people read Agatha Christie mysteries. I want to learn who done it. How words became words. And when they became words.

The dictionary lists as precisely as possible when a word became widespread enough for inclusion.

That’s how I became acquainted with the history of stupid.

According to the OED, stupid is only 470 years old. I thought stupidity was as old as Adam.

Check out the sentence used in 1541 to inaugurate stupid, attributed to a Mr. R. Copland who included the word in his book, “Galen’s Fourth Terapeutyk: “For the fyrste speake ouer lyghtly and to imprudently,‥and the other are all togyther stupydes, sturdy, & lytygious.”

Inserting that sentence into my otherwise pristine copy nearly caused my laptop spell checker to explode. The 19-word sentence includes seven modern misspellings.

Maybe Mr. R. Copland was stupid.

I was hoping stupid was an eponym -- a name derived from a person. Then I could learn more about Mr. Stupid. In fact, it might have inspired me to write a dandy History Channel documentary, “A Man Named Stupid.”

Here’s a factoid to brighten your day: money was named for Thomas le Mony who lived way back in the 13th century, when it must have cost, gee, one egg to fill up your whole tank.

So money was in effect coined for Mony. How rich!

Assuming he was generous it would have been good to have been neighbors with Mony, at least until the 99 percent showed up to occupy and crap all over his yard.

Words spelled by smart people were what led me to look up stupid.

In this November 8 post about Herman Cain’s follies, I wrote about the times when my old newspaper asked me to chaperone spelling bee contestants to the National Spelling Bee in Washington. I needed some examples of winning words and found a list of every winner since it all BEE-gan in 1925.

Recent winning words include “cymotrichous” and “stromuhr,” examples too obscure and frightening for even word nerds like me to look up.

But what most struck me about the list was the steep increase in the degree of difficulty of winning words over the past 86 years.

Early winners were “fracas,” “interning,” “therapy,” and “initials.”

Can you believe it?

Turns out The Greatest Generation had weak vocabularies.

In fact, I’ve seen “fracas” on my daughter’s 5th grade spelling tests.

Guaranteed, there’s no way our nation’s best spellers from past decades could have conquered “rageshree,” “ramachandran,” “pratyush,” or “shivashankar.”

Don’t beat yourself up if those four mentions leave you scratching your head. They’re not spelling bee words. Those are actual names of some recent winners.

Kids named Bob Smith or Sue Miller have been getting drummed out in the early rounds.

So, speaking of Mony, it’s another day, another dollar here in Blogland.

I wonder if by spending my time doing things like this will one day lead to my name being included for posterity in some prominent dictionary.

“rodell, v., U.S.A., 2011: A nonsensical use of time. Example: “I rodelled the whole day away looking up stupid things in the dictionary.”

Expense accounting the national spelling bee

In keeping with my week-old pledge to add more to the mix, this is a timely Spelling Bee rerun from 2009. The stats page told me somebody was peeking at it and thought I'd toss it up in case anyone is interested in how generous I am with other people's money.

As many Americans watched last week’s National Spelling Bee and wondered how children could correctly spell so many polysyllabic words and why most of those that do look like Mumbai extras from “Slumdog Millionaire,” I had more altruistic thoughts.

I wondered how the hundreds of children whose lives I altered for the better are doing today. I wondered how many of them have gone on to to be doctors, educators or noble philanthropists. I wondered if any of them remember me in their prayers.

You see the annual National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., has for more than 20 years been a hallmark event in my life. It’s an annual commemoration of two weeks in consecutive years when I did more good on behalf of my fellow man than the sum entirety my misspent life.

It was my first experience with an expense account and I learned something illuminating about myself.

I’m a hell of a lot of fun with someone else’s money.

I was a rookie reporter at the now-defunct Nashville Banner, and there’s a perhaps coincidental pattern of places that can be described as now-defunct that once entrusted me with the company loot.

I vividly remember the top editor approaching me while I feigned industriousness by carrying on a pretend phone interview into a dead receiver. I said a polite goodbye to the imaginary subject, set the phone down and looked up. Yes, boss?

“The guy who’s covered the National Spelling Bee for the past 10 years is sick of it. We want you to fly to Washington, chaperone our entrant and write stories about the bee,” he said.

The Banner building had no windows. One editor described days there as similar to being on board a submarine during a long voyage beneath the Arctic circle. I was always thrilled to get outside and enjoy the sweet Tennessee sunshine. That’s why I was so crushed by the boss’s offer.

I’m sorry, I said, but I just can’t afford to fly to Washington and stay in a hotel myself, let alone pay for some poindexter spelling champ.

“Idiot,” he said, “the paper pays for everything. You’ll have an expense account.”

It was a watershed moment in my life. As I’ve truthfully said many times, my idea of a splurge at the time was pizza with pepperoni and sausage. To think that I was going to be let loose in a glamorous city with ample bags of someone else’s money was like some kindly bandit had cut me in on the spree following the bank holdup, an analogy you’ll see is rather apt.

I remember checking into the Capital Hilton and finding a fully stocked bar brimming with dozens of top shelf little bottles of hootch.

Eureka! I thought. I shoveled them all into my suitcase, figuring housekeeping would assume I was a thirsty guy and would re-stock the next morning and we’d begin repeating the procedure for the next five days. And that’s exactly what happened. I didn’t know that each tiny bottle carried a $3 to $5 fee.

With a crisp $20 and bright smile, I became best friends with Pierre the hotel concierge. Over the course of the week, I had a dozen or so conversations with Pierre and every one of them included some form of the line, “Say, Pierre, where can I find the best (lobster, steak, cigars) in town.”

My father was vicariously thrilled with my experience. He called to advise me to attend the Kennedy Center premier of The Caine Mutiny Court Marshall starring Charleton Heston Henry Fonda. Pierre expertly secured me one of the scarce tickets. And this was cool -- President Reagan and wife Nancy were there, too!

My balcony seat was directly above Reagan’s box. I’ll never forget the moment he entered. More than four thousand people rose, turned toward me and began wildly applauding. From my perspective, it looked like they were looking right at me.

I felt so overcome with warmth, I couldn’t help myself. I waved and took a little bow.

Really, after four days on the expense account, word could have gotten around and they may have been applauding for me and not Reagan. As a representative of the Banner, I felt it would have reflected poorly on the institution if I was a cheap tipper, even if the pious old prick who owned the place was a notorious cheapskate.

All the while, I filed a bunch of fun stories about our contestant to cover my rear. It was one of those rare and wonderful occasions where I could be professional for about two hours each afternoon and still get away with being excessive fun for the remainder of the sleepless days and nights spent enriching hardworking bartenders and wait staff at various posh establishments.

As good as the stories were, nothing endeared me to the Banner staff more than word about my stupendous party expenditures.

The color drained from my editor’s face when I handed him the total.

“It’s breathtaking,” he said.

It was the first time anything I’d ever done had been compared with the Grand Canyon.

Oh, it’s not that bad, I said.

“It cost less to cover the Super Bowl!”

After that, they wouldn’t let me out of the building to cover a barn fire. It looked like my spelling bee run would end at one.

Then three weeks before the next year’s bee, the girl who’d been designated to go abruptly quit.

I sat down at my computer and instantly composed what was the best thing I’ve ever written in my life. It may have been the best thing anyone’s ever written.

Because I convinced them to risk the company solvency to let me go again. I didn’t do it because I enjoyed living the high life on the company teat. I didn’t do it because I was hankering lobster at Harvey’s or prime rib at The Palm.

I did it because Pierre’d sent me a Christmas card saying his son was going to need braces.

We’re numb to stories of idealists who leave heartland homes and go to Washington and become jaded cogs in the corrupt system.

I’m a guy who can always say he went to Washington and made a real difference.

Expense accounting the national spelling bee

As many Americans watched last week’s National Spelling Bee and wondered how children could correctly spell so many polysyllabic words and why most of those that do look like Mumbai extras from “Slumdog Millionaire,” I had more altruistic thoughts.

I wondered how the hundreds of children whose lives I altered for the better are doing today. I wondered how many of them have gone on to to be doctors, educators or noble philanthropists. I wondered if any of them remember me in their prayers.

You see the annual National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., has for more than 20 years been a hallmark event in my life. It’s an annual commemoration of two weeks in consecutive years when I did more good on behalf of my fellow man than the sum entirety my misspent life.

It was my first experience with an expense account and I learned something illuminating about myself.

I’m a hell of a lot of fun with someone else’s money.

I was a rookie reporter at the now-defunct Nashville Banner, and there’s a perhaps coincidental pattern of places that can be described as now-defunct that once entrusted me with the company loot.

I vividly remember the top editor approaching me while I feigned industriousness by carrying on a pretend phone interview into a dead receiver. I said a polite goodbye to the imaginary subject, set the phone down and looked up. Yes, boss?

“The guy who’s covered the National Spelling Bee for the past 10 years is sick of it. We want you to fly to Washington, chaperone our entrant and write stories about the bee,” he said.

The Banner building had no windows. One editor described days there as similar to being on board a submarine during a long voyage beneath the Arctic circle. I was always thrilled to get outside and enjoy the sweet Tennessee sunshine. That’s why I was so crushed by the boss’s offer.

I’m sorry, I said, but I just can’t afford to fly to Washington and stay in a hotel myself, let alone pay for some poindexter spelling champ.

“Idiot,” he said, “the paper pays for everything. You’ll have an expense account.”

It was a watershed moment in my life. As I’ve truthfully said many times, my idea of a splurge at the time was pizza with pepperoni and sausage. To think that I was going to be let loose in a glamorous city with ample bags of someone else’s money was like some kindly bandit had cut me in on the spree following the bank holdup, an analogy you’ll see is rather apt.

I remember checking into the Capital Hilton and finding a fully stocked bar brimming with dozens of top shelf little bottles of hootch.

Eureka! I thought. I shoveled them all into my suitcase, figuring housekeeping would assume I was a thirsty guy and would re-stock the next morning and we’d begin repeating the procedure for the next five days. And that’s exactly what happened. I didn’t know that each tiny bottle carried a $3 to $5 fee.

With a crisp$20 and bright smile, I became best friends with Pierre the hotel concierge. Over the course of the week, I had a dozen or so conversations with Pierre and every one of them included some form of the line, “Say, Pierre, where can I find the best (lobster, steak, cigars) in town.”

My father was vicariously thrilled with my experience. He called to advise me to attend the Kennedy Center premier of The Caine Mutiny Court Marshall starring Charleton Heston Henry Fonda. Pierre expertly secured me one of the scarce tickets. And this was cool -- President Reagan and wife Nancy were there, too!

My balcony seat was directly above Reagan’s box. I’ll never forget the moment he entered. More than four thousand people rose, turned toward me and began wildly applauding. From my perspective, it looked like they were looking right at me.

I felt so overcome with warmth, I couldn’t help myself. I waved and took a little bow.

Really, after four days on the expense account, word could have gotten around and they may have been applauding for me and not Reagan. As a representative of the Banner, I felt it would have reflected poorly on the institution if I was a cheap tipper, even if the pious old prick who owned the place was a notorious cheapskate.

All the while, I filed a bunch of fun stories about our contestant to cover my rear. It was one of those rare and wonderful occasions where I could be professional for about two hours each afternoon and still get away with being excessive fun for the remainder of the sleepless days and nights spent enriching hardworking bartenders and wait staff at various posh establishments.

As good as the stories were, nothing endeared me to the Banner staff more than word about my stupendous party expenditures.

The color drained from my editor’s face when I handed him the total.

“It’s breathtaking,” he said.

It was the first time anything I’d ever done had been compared with words used to describe to the Grand Canyon.

Oh, it’s not that bad, I said.

“It cost less to cover the Super Bowl!”

After that, they wouldn’t let me out of the building to cover a barn fire. It looked like my spelling bee run would end at one.

Then three weeks before the next year’s bee, the girl who’d been designated to go abruptly quit.

I sat down at my computer and instantly composed what was the best thing I’ve ever written in my life. It may have been the best thing anyone’s ever written.

Because I convinced them to risk the company solvency to let me go again. I didn’t do it because I enjoyed living the high life on the company teat. I didn’t do it because I was hankering lobster at Harvey’s or prime rib at The Palm.

I did it because Pierre’d sent me a Christmas card saying his son was going to need braces.

We’re numb to stories of idealists who leave heartland homes and go to Washington and become jaded cogs in the corrupt system.

I’m a guy who can always say he went to Washington and made a real difference.