Nation Spelling Bee

So after all these years, the winning word was not only one I'd heard of, but can spell. Ursprache! Okay, like a good German student I always spell it with a capital U. Of course that's the joke. The National spelling bee isn't about spelling standard English words. It's about spelling godawful jargon, modern foreign words that a select few use as if they were English, and obscure pseudo-Greek and pseudo-Latin terms that have been stuck into English over the centuries by folks who though those languages were cool.

It would be nice if English had phonetic spelling so that spelling bees would be a thing of the past. That isn't practical because the way we speak English isn't uniform around the world. But, I do wish that these big contests would be more honest in saying that what they are testing for gets very far from English, at times.