To the editor:
It’s hardly up there with Watergate — or even the Mueller Report — but there could be a contretemps buzzing around the recently concluded Scripps National Spelling Bee. Yes, I refer to what someday may be known as “Beegate.”
After 20 rounds of competition, eight intrepid spellsters refused to give a contentious centimeter as the pool of remaining contest words neared exhaustion. The result? Octochamps! Eight national champion superspellers! Of the eight, however, six were $600-a-year subscribers to a coaching service called SpellPundit. (Indeed, as reported by the New York Times, 38 of the 50 final little bees were in fact premium-paying Pundit pupae.) Now, there’s nothing illegal about parents paying slightly obscene fees to win logographic immortality for their offspring. Yet, given the recent pay-to-play college admissions scandal benefiting the rich and famous, the Spell Pundit approach might sour many Bee purists.
A former Bee finalist, according to the Times, expressed just such an opinion on his spelling blog, BeeNN (I’m not making this up, folks!). Now, I confess to having paid a dollar to see Mary Poppins in 1964 so I could learn to recite perfectly all 34 letters of “superfragilisticexpialidocious” should it show up in any spelling bee I entered. But still, even adjusting for inflation, $600 per year so your kid can kick some orthographic butt seems a bit steep. One person not upset with Bee results (at least at first) was POTUS 45, who loves all televised competitions. Word was soon out that the president had invited the Octochamps and their families to the White House to celebrate with “grilledcheeseburgerswithrelishketchuponions.”
When asked by reporters to spell that, POTUS smiled, saying, “You can’t trap me, you fake newsies, it’s B-I-G-M-A-C—just ask F-O-X.” However, the president quickly succumbed to foot-in-mouth syndrome by telling the teenaged spelling mavens they couldn’t lay a glove on an extremely stable genius like himself. “I once spelled ‘exonerated’ correctly on a blackboard 50 times in a row before the teacher said I was supposed to spell ‘obstruction’ instead — haha!”
The president became more irate when reminded that he recently finished 26 th to a 25-member class of 5 th graders in a spelling bee in El Paso, Texas. “Maybe those future MS-13 recruits will learn how to spell ‘incarcerated’ when they get 15-to-20 in Gitmo!” In the background an Oval Office TV tuned to FOX News played “Lock Them Up! Lock Them Up!” audio from an old Trump monster rally.
Daniel (not “Dan”) Sullivan
Bennington