The nation's capital always draws its share of protesters, picketing for causes ranging from health care reform to immigration policy.
But spelling bee protesters? They're out here, too.
Four peaceful protesters, some dressed in full-length black and yellow bee costumes, represented the American Literacy Council and the London-based Spelling Society and stood outside the Grand Hyatt on Thursday, where the Scripps National Spelling Bee is being held. Their message was short: Simplify the way we spell words.
Roberta Mahoney, 81, a former Fairfax County, Va. elementary school principal, said the current language obstructs 40 percent of the population from learning how to read, write and spell.
"Our alphabet has 425-plus ways of putting words together in illogical ways," Mahoney said.
The protesting cohort distributed pins to willing passers-by with their logo, "Enuf is enuf. Enough is too much."
According to literature distributed by the group, it makes more sense for "fruit" to be spelled as "froot," "slow" should be "slo," and "heifer" — a word spelled correctly during the first oral round of the bee Thursday by Texas competitor Ramesh Ghanta — should be "hefer."
Meanwhile, inside the hotel's Independence Ballroom, 273 spellers celebrated the complexity of the language in all its glory, correctly spelling words like zaibatsu, vibrissae and biauriculate.
While the protesters could make headway with cell phone texters who routinely swap "u" for "you" and "gr8" for "great," their message may be a harder sell for the Scripps crowd.
Mahoney had trouble gaining traction with at least one bee attendee. New Mexico resident Matthew Evans, 15, a former speller whose sister is participating in the bee this year, reasoned with her that if English spellings were changed, spelling bees would cease to exist.
"If a dictionary lists 'enough' as 'enuf,' the spelling bee goes by the dictionary, therefore all the spelling words are easier to spell, so the spelling bee is gone," Evans said.
"Well," Mahoney replied, "they could pick their own dictionary."
Is it just me, or do these people seem like they aren't all there? Seriously, enough should be spelled enuf? What kind of foolishness is that?
I don't know, maybe I'm just tapping into that English minor I have as well as my regional spelling bee titles (never got to the state level...GRRR!!!), but this just seems wrong beyond wrong.
Not sure which is worse, though, the fact these people are holding this pointless protest because they feel certain words should be spelled a certain way (most likely because they think its easier or that's how they text), or that they think they actually have a point!
I hate to say it, but some folks should have their free speech rights revoked!
3 comments:
If you asked me, spelling the protesters way just makes us seem illiterate. And how many shortcuts do we really need? Maybe we should just stop teaching algebra and only teach adding and subtracting.
Maybe these people just have a lot of free time on hand and cannot figure out how to use it.
I think it is a very unimaginative person who cannot spell a word two or three different ways... haha...
Colin.
Lola- you are so right. its not like the rest of the world thinks we're geniuses already, and now they want us toi change the way we spell? WTF?!? of course, if they wanted to go back to justr teachign addition and subtraction, i wouldn';t mind (i wasn o good at math...lol)
Colin- i tend to think so, or they're the kind that have used so much text speech that they forgot how to weite complete words anymore...lol
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