Brian Kiehl says he expects things will be hunky-dory during the 2024 Monongalia County Schools Spelling Bee, which will be Jan. 10 at the district’s central office in Sabraton.
Kiehl is an administrator in the district who began organizing the spelling bee right before the pandemic.
Might you be wondering, that word, “hunky-dory,” has its origins in Dutch and basically means that all is well.
Mon spellers have taken on that word in past bees.
Others, also, such as “kurta,” “calamitous” and “diaphoresis.”
Don’t forget “ichor.”
(You know: the ethereal stuff taking the place of blood in the veins of the gods of Greek
mythology.)
Then there are the words, just because of the way they sound, that have been known to make competitors bust up laughing in past bees.
“Babushka,” for example.
That one famously reduced one Mon speller to a nearly 90-second giggling fit, before he recovered to spell it — correctly.
Yep, there are more than 1 million words in the English vocabulary, with most owing their origins to Latin and Old English.
There are the aforementioned Dutch derivatives and carryovers from French and Yiddish, too.
In the U.S., generations of elementary students and middle-schoolers have been gathering and working through words in earnest since 1925.
That was the year a Kentucky newspaper first launched an official competition for lexicon-minded youngsters in the Bluegrass State.
Now, nearly 100 years later, the bee is a bona fide American intellectual event, with the national finals held in the Washington, D.C. area — it always happens in May — with all that media coverage.
There are the newspapers carrying guest columns from the finalists in the readership area.
Social media.
C-SPAN.
And more.
In today’s time of low reading scores and seemingly no reading fluency, some educators who are critics of spelling bees say they’re lots of work — with little return.
The repetition and learning by rote, they worry, can only make for fleeting moments of shakily acquired knowledge. Moments, they say, that are gone, just as soon as a speller slinks to a seat in the auditorium, defeated in the first round.
Joe Paull, the late educator and community organizer, used to gleefully pronounce the above assessments … wrong.
He called out the words for spelling bees in Mon and the region for more than 30 years and said there’s more brainwork to the endeavor than it might appear.
Prepping for the bee does help with reading fluency, he’d say.
Besides, he’d continue, there’s the etymology, history, anthropology and sociology of the endeavor — all wrapped up in one word.
Spelling bees foster self-esteem, critical thinking and deductive reasoning, he added.
Being in the bee, he said, means one couldn’t be more alone on stage.
Even with the moms and the dads and the little brothers and the big sisters in the audience.
No spell-checker or dictionary app either, he said.
Spellers, he said, might be better served having ice water running in their veins rather than ichor.
“Think about that,” he said.
“You’re in the arena, basically in front of a lot of people you don’t know, doing something that’s not always easy to do.”
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