SPELLING BEES

Sewing, spinning, quilting, husking, apple and logging bees have been around since the colonies were, well, colonies. Predominantly female centered activities, they afforded the women a chance to get together and socialize. They weren’t only social, however: “In the 1760s spinning bees became more political as they were held to protest the importation of British goods, which were now being more heavily taxed” (see BOYCOTT). The ‘bee’ in spelling bee did not appear in print until the mid-nineteenth century but was almost certainly used orally decades before.

Quilting Bee, Northern

Blvd., Queens, Courtesy of

the New York Public

Library, www.nypl.org

Recent etymological scholarship has its doubts about the long held theory that the ‘bee’ in ‘spelling bee’ is a reference to the insect, a linguistic leap attributed to the “obvious similarity between these human gatherings [sewing, spinning…logging bees] and the industrious, social nature of the beehive,” a place where queens rule, drones drone, guards guard and the riffraff flit about all day bringing home the bacon, or in their case pollen, the location of which is communicated with a nice dance: the round dance, if it’s close by, or if “it’s complicated,” the waggle dance to express the distance and direction in relationship to the sun. Female frequent flyers can log up to two miles day, and the queen, of course, concentrates on laying eggs (up to 2,000 per diem, talk about a full-time job) and killing competitors (an activity familiar to all high school girls).

Honey Bee with Pollen,

http://en.wikipedia.org

The question is: If an association between the insect and these colonial bees isn’t the root of ‘bee’ in ‘spelling bee,’ what is?

The answer is elusive. According to the Scripps National Spelling Bee Bee Week Guide: “One possibility is that is comes from the Middle English word bene, which means ‘a prayer’ or ‘a favor.’ In England, a dialect form of this word, been or bean, referred to ‘voluntary help given by neighbors toward the accomplishment of a particular task…’ Bee may simply be a shortened form of been but no one is entirely certain.”

Deborah Read Franklin,

Common-Law Wife of

Benjamin Franklin,

http://en.wikipedia.org

What is certain, or almost certain, is that spelling bees began in the Northeast (New England and New York) and flourished alongside a mounting concern for language and literacy. Fearing that the country would splinter into separate linguistic enclaves, Benjamin Franklin, “...the Father of Purism in American English,” took action. He broached the idea of public speaking contests (complete with prizes) and in 1768, presented an iffy scheme for a new alphabet (with six new letters) in his A Reformed Mode of Spelling. According to Bill Bryson:  “ ...it is not clear whether he regarded his modified alphabet as a serious attempt at orthographic reform or merely as an amusing way of writing mildly flirtatious letters to a pretty young correspondent.” Frankly, we don’t know what to think.

Noah Webster, a puritanical Connecticut lawyer/teacher who believed that someday “North America [would] be Peopled with a hundred millions of men, all speaking the same language,” carried forth this patriotic quest for “one tongue.”  Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language was quite influential, and his American Spelling Book a.k.a. the ‘blue-backed speller’)  “...went through so many editions and sold so many copies that historians appear to have lost track.” Priced at 14 cents, it “flew off the shelves.” Colonists snapped up somewhere between 60 and 80 million copies in his lifetime, making it the second best selling book in American history. (Of course, this was at a time when literacy was something Americans were concerned about.) Webster, who toured constantly preaching what he practiced, put it matter-of-factly: “Our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government.”

The 1908 Play that Popularized
the Image of America as a Melting Pot,
http://en.wikipedia.org

America seemed to agree. Public contests as well as contests in the classroom (the loser swept the schoolroom and lit the fire in the morning, motivation enough during the winter months) spread, flourished and soon could be held up as proof that good spelling, and therefore, literacy, and therefore, stature in the community were not a function of caste or class but diligence.

Man with a Microchip,
http://www.flickr.com

In some small towns, spelling matches, held once a week, evolved into a form of entertainment for the entire community with most decked out in their Sunday best. (No one, of course, really had anything to do outside of chores and childbirth in those pre-transistor/microchip days.) New Englanders, always on the cutting edge, began to get bored with bees and moved on to other more sophisticated group activities, like spin-the-bottle. (Footnote: We were unable to track the origins of spin-the-bottle but can report that it thrives as we speak, and that, yes, there is an iPhone app for it.)  

Spelling matches, unlike almost everything else, blossomed on the postbellum Western frontier (even in mining camps). In fact, they became a principal learning exercise in schools taught by many of those same New England teachers. 

The Midwest, by the way, may not have caught on to spin the bottle as soon as New England, but come husking time, some comparable extracurricular activity was clearly going on: 

Red Ears, Courtesy of Chiot's
Run, http://www.flickr.com

“It was wonderful how many red ears of corn there were in the husking, and how many red ears of another sort there were after the kissing. ’Twas the wee sma’(ll) hours of the morning when the husking bee broke up, and no telling how many sweet secrets were told that get the hearts of the lads and lassies to tingling as they wended their way home through the cool twilight.”

Extracurricular activities aside, a decade after the Civil War, folks were beginning to worry about spelling practices (with good reason; just read some of the letters and diaries of the day). Spelling reform appeared to be on nearly everyone’s agenda; everyone including Mark Twain, an advocate of simplified spelling, who penned his own A Simplified Alphabet (and simplified writing—a big fan of shorthand early on, he was the first author to write a book, Life on the Mississippi, with a “typemachine as he insisted on calling it”). Speaking in Hartford, Connecticut (where he lived) to students vying for the 1875 title, Twain, with tongue planted (as always) firmly in cheek, had this to say on the subject: 

“…I don’t see any use in spelling a word right, and never did. I mean I don’t see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling words. We might as well make all clothes fit alike and cook all dishes alike. Sameness is tiresome, variety is pleasing” (see FAST FOODS).

Mark Twain, Courtesy of Prints and Photographs

Division, Library of Congress, USZ62-127284 

The same year that Twain spoke in Hartford, the first public spelling contest in New York City history took place at the Cooper Institute, where, fifteen years earlier, Abraham Lincoln, had jump-started his bid for the presidency. Things didn’t go well as the subhead revealed: AMUSING SCENE IN COOPER INSTITUTE LAST EVENING. It seems the contest was not organized or conducted properly, any number of issues arose, and the audience became “quite disputatory.” (The matches, especially, it seems, in the “old days,” were rather interactive.) Plus, audiences apparently were on the rise. Four thousand Philadelphians turned out for a contest, where a controversy erupted over the word ‘reseat,’ or was it, upon further hearing, ‘receipt’? 

Ralph Waldo Emerson,
http://en.wikipedia.org

By the turn of the century, spelling bees were in vogue in New York and New England again. Theater-going was, in some circles, considered improper, and you could only take so many of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lectures. (In his own words, “A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.”) Besides, the admission price was right. Bees were cheap to produce—the game shows of their day—and thought to be “intellectual.”

Some matches would begin in the early evening and last till after midnight. Some got physical: In 1877, Nellie Wilson and Rosie McGrath fought each other in an out-and-out wrestling match. (Nellie ended up doing time.) In 1906, a thousand watched EIGHTEEN CONTESTANTS SPELL FOR TWO HOURS WITHOUT MISTAKE. In years to come, some contestants fainted.

If the language of the day reflected the culture, as in this 1908 headline: COLORED GIRL WINS SPELLING BEE, the language of Mary Bolden, the fourteen-year-old Cleveland girl referred to in the headline, you might say, reflected times gone by: “I didn’t enter the contest for personal glory, but to try and honor my school.”

Charleston at the Capitol,

Courtesy of Prints and 

Division, Library of

Congress, Photographs

USZ62-93721

A 1922 New York Times article observed: 

“In the long ago, when life was simple and milk was 4 cents a quart, social gatherings were frequent among neighbors who competed for honors in spelling…Certainly the indoor sport of spelling bees, so popular in the days when the schoolhouses were painted red, is worth reviving—as an antidote to jazz and frivolity.”

Sixty-one years later, Andrew Flosdorf, a thirteen-year-old, who would come to be known for his sportsmanship, if not his spelling, told the judges he’d received credit for a word that he’d, in fact, misspelled. (He had put an ‘e’ instead of an ‘a’ in ‘echolalia.’) The judges went to the tapes, and sure enough, he was right. During the flurry of interviews that followed the thirteen-year-old said that he “didn’t want to feel like a slime” and, besides, “the first rule of scouting is honesty.”

*            *            *            *

  

In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson and his suffragette daughter, Jessie, attended a spelling match that pitted congressmen against journalists. Thirteen years later, Coolidge posed with several bee finalists. Politicians were now involved, and you know what that means: whining. In a post-game locker room interview after the second Congress v Media clash in 1930, the runner-up—a Representative accustomed to scapegoating, no doubt—attributed his loss to his reliance on such modern conveniences as secretaries and typists. 

 President Eisenhower reminisced with one winner about losing a bee as a boy. Others had the dubious honor of a meet-and-greet with FBI head J. Edgar Hoover.

Calvin Coolidge with the Finalists in the National Spelling Bee,

Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of

Congress, USZ62-111740

Speaking of politicians, how ’bout that Ronald Reagan and his 1983 photo-op (see PHOTO-OP) with the National Spelling Bee Finalists and the resultant headline: REAGAN REITERATES HIS DESIRE TO ELIMINATE EDUCATION DEPT. “There is too much federal government in education,” President Reagan offered shortly before eliminating all education from education with his “every child left behind” policy.

Official Portrait of Prez
Reagan and Veep Bush,
1981, http://en.wikipedia.org

Bush the Elder, who believed that all good policy rhymes, e.g. his “Weed and Seed” education program, picked up where Reagan left off. In 1992, he sent his veep Dan “You’re no John Kennedy” Quayle to Trenton, New Jersey as part of a campaign to build support for his education initiative. Quayle-with-a-y sat in on a spelling bee between about twenty-five students. One of the sixth-grade boys wrote ‘potato’ on the blackboard, and the Vice-President incorrectly corrected the boy, pointing out that he had forgotten the “e” at the end. The incident became national news (natch) and a week’s worth of content on Late Night TV.

A local newspaper reported the boy’s views on the incident: “[It] showed the rumors are true—that he’s an idiot.”

As we’ve seen, newspapers gave spelling bees extensive coverage. In 1925, The Scripps National Spelling Bee was established, and by 1934, CBC was broadcasting the event coast-to-coast. Four years later, NBC transmitted the Harvard/Radcliffe v Oxford contest: AMERICAN SPELLERS BEAT BRITISH IN THEIR FIRST TRANSATLANTIC BEE.

Ed Sullivan & Two Beatles,
http://www.flickr.com

The end of the 1950s brought the Scripps National champ to the hugely (inexplicably) popular “Ed Sullivan Show.” Even so, TV execs were slow to see the “wisdom” (read profits) in this low budget (for them) programming. Finally, in 1994, ESPN, only just beginning to redefine the word ‘sport’ (as in  moneyball), began televising the final rounds (with contestants now required to follow the dreaded face time dress codes; bee shirt, some felt that some were competing in less than “telegenic” attire). In 2002, the Academy nominated “Spellbound,” which made Angela, Nupur, Ted, Emily, Ashley, Neil, April and Harry familiar faces, for Best Documentary. “TWO THUMBS UP!” blurbed Ebert and Roeper. Four years later, network television brought the National Spelling Bee to over nine million viewers. Today, it’s streamed live on the Internet.

The Bee has its fair share of eligibility rules and regs (e.g. you have to be a student of an officially enrolled school, who hasn’t yet turned fifteen and who has won a local final, and you can’t be a past winner of the national championship) spelled out in twelve bulleted requirements, eight being: “The speller must not bypass or circumvent normal school activity to study for spelling bees.” 

84th Scripps Spelling Bee Top Finishers,
By ScrippsBee, http://www.flickr.com

As if to prove the enforcement of this requirement: Some of the spellers appeared in a feature called “Part-time Spellers, Full-time Kids.” One was the winner of a UNICEF greeting card competition, another was a survivor of Katrina and a third sang in a local rest home. Others lent a hand at a local horse rescue ranch and planned to go to Tanzania to volunteer at orphanage for children whose parents had died of AIDS.

Mick Jagger & Keith Richards Not
Necessarily Singing "Loving Cup,"
http://en.wikipedia.org

Each year brings more and more contestants, as diverse as the words they spell, which have become harder and more international. A disproportionate number of the winners are home schooled—a fact with debatable implications. Three ties have occurred to date. (Finalists seemed to refuse to misspell and exhausted the available word list, if not themselves.) Many contestants are repeaters: kids who have competed in The National Bee two, three, four or even five times before. The winner gets nearly 30,000 in cash and an engraved loving cup (plus a Nook eReader). Past winners have, almost exactly, been half boys and half girls.

Sukanya Roy,

http://en.wikipedia.org

In 2011, a Pennsylvania girl, Sukanya Roy emerged victorious after twenty rounds that saw 274 other contestants eliminated. Tracing the letters in the palm of her hand as she spoke, Ms. Roy spelled ‘cymotrichous’ correctly. As far as articulating how she felt, the eighth grader had this to say: “It’s hard to put into words.”

Speaking of which, here are the winning words over the last five years: ‘stromuhr,’ ‘Laodicean,’ ‘guerdon,’ ‘serrefine’ and ‘Ursprache.’ ‘Ursprache’ is “a hypothetically reconstructed parent language.”

Bibliography

“Scripps National Spelling Bee,” Bee Week Guide, 2008

“American Spellers Beat British in Their First Transatlantic Bee,” the New York Times, Jan. 31, 1938

Boorstin, Daniel J.; The Americans: The Colonial Experience

Brinkley, Alan; The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American Nation

Bryson, Bill; Made in America

—————; Mother Tongue

“Colored Girl Wins Big Spelling Bee,” Special to the New York Times, Jun. 30, 1908

“Congress Humbled in Spelling Bee,” Special to the New York Times, Mar. 30, 1930

Denenberg, Barry; Lincoln Shot: A President’s Life Remembered

Emerson, Ralph Waldo; “The American Scholar,” http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/amscholar.html

“Gothamites Spell, But Not in Calico,” New York Times, Jun. 2, 1908

Maguire, James; American Bee: The National Spelling Bee and the Culture of Word Nerds

McCrum, Robert; The Story of English

“Misspeller Is a Spelling Bee Hero,” New York Times, Jun. 9, 1983

Nieves, Evelyn; Spelling by Quayle (That’s with an ‘e’), Special to the New York Times, Jun. 17, 1992

The Random House College Dictionary

Read, Alan Walker; “The Spelling bee: A Linguistic Institution of the American Folk,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, ed. Percy Waldron Long, v. LVI, 1941, 495–512

Randall, Emilius Oviatt and Daniel Joseph Ryan; Ohio: The Rise and Progress of the American State, v. 3, 1912

“Reagan Reiterates His Desire to Eliminate Education Dept.,” the New York Times, Jun. 7, 1983

“Spellbound”; DVD, Sony Pictures

Stoddart, Alexander; “Spelling Bee Coming Back,” the New York Times, Feb. 12 1922

www.garrisonhouse.org/spinningbee

“In the 1760s,…”; www.garrisonhouse.org/spinningbee
“...obvious similarity…”; the Scripps National Spelling Bee Bee Week Guide, 6

“One possibility…”; Ibid

“…the Father of…”; Boorstin, 278

“…it is not…”; Bryson, Made in America, 53

“North America….”; Boorstin, 271

“…went through…”; Bryson, Mother Tongue, 155

“Our honor….”; Bryson, Made in America, 76

“It was wonderful….”; Randall, 20

“…typemachine…”; Bryson, Made in America, 94

 “…I don’t see…”; Read, 507

“A great soul….”; Emerson, 1

“I didn’t enter….”; Special to the New York Times, “Colored Girl...,” 7

“In the long ago,…”; Stoddart, 77

“…didn’t want to…”; New York Times, “Misspeller Is a…,” A14

“…the first rule…”; Ibid

“There is too….”; New York Times, “Reagan Reiterates...,” A19

“[It] showed….”; Nieves, a23

“Two thumbs…”; Spellbound DVD Sony Pictures

“The speller….”; Bee Week Guide, 7

“…a hypothetically…”; The Random House College Dictionary, 1447