‘Cemetery’ lives to haunt me again
I had an unsettling flashback on the day of the Flathead County Spelling Bee, the annual showdown of top spellers held Feb. 13 this year.
Prior to the event, a few of us in the newsroom were talking about our spelling-bee experiences from days gone by, and I shared how I had succumbed to the word “cemetery” in our sixth-grade spelling bee, spelling the last three letters “a-r-y” instead of “e-r-y.” I was pretty much a straight-A student, but was taken down by the likes of Wally Kluck, a quiet kid who probably got average grades and was not a standout student in any way.
On that day, Wally triumphed over me. The humiliation ran deep, so deep that I’ve harbored some level of resentment ever since.
When Inter Lake education reporter Hilary Matheson came back from the recent spelling bee and told me the winning word was “cemetery,” I couldn’t believe it. Cayuse Prairie sixth-grader Mary Grace Carey won with the very word that had botched a victory for me so many years ago.
Spelling words correctly has been an important part of my life, since I’ve spent more than four decades writing and editing stories. I wouldn’t call myself an expert speller by any means. I remember 20-plus years ago when then-Inter Lake City Editor Jackie Adams admonished me within earshot of the entire newsroom for misspelling accordion. Suffice to say I never misspelled it again.
Who knows how many spelling errors retired Assistant Managing Editor Scott Crandell corrected in my stories in the days before spell-check and auto-correct. Crandell won the Colorado State Spelling Bee in 1969 at age 12, so nothing got by him.
Another of my editors when I was just a cub reporter in Minnesota gave weekly spelling tests at our staff meetings, another opportunity for humiliation among co-workers.
So here we are in 2020, and some of you perhaps are wondering if spelling even matters anymore. For the most part our computers and phones correct our mistakes.
We used to give spelling tests to those applying for reporter jobs, but the results typically were so abysmal we quit giving the tests a few years ago. Even some of the brightest and most gifted journalists these days struggle with spelling.
But an article about parenting written by Rebekah Denn and published Jan. 29, 2019, in The Washington Post poses the obvious question: “Can anyone spell anymore, and does it even matter?” She noted it’s difficult to determine whether spelling prowess has withered, “partly because it’s not usually tested anymore in a way we can isolate and track.” Denn quoted sources who pointed out state accountability tests these days “seldom include direct measures for spelling competence.”
Correct spelling used to be a good measure of one’s ability of professionalism, but not so much anymore. Our smartphones anticipate our words and spell them for us. We have spell-check and auto-correct, so who needs spelling? Texting and Twitter have given us all kinds of acceptable acronyms and short-cuts. Bad spelling is just one symptom of an ailing English language that may never recover from our self-inflicted sabotage.
I’m glad county spelling bees still exist. And I hope on some level, spelling will always matter.
News Editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.