BobHarris.com - Closed-captioning the National Spelling Bee

Books! Actual books!

"A rollicking ride of intellectual discovery and emotional growth... his comic timing never fails"

-- The Wall Street Journal

"Pulls you in like a good sports story"

-- The New York Times Book Review

"Endearingly frank... jubilant... lighthearted and fast-paced"

-- New York Newsday

"A surprisingly touching memoir"

-- Entertainment Weekly

"Snappy and informative"

-- Associated Press

"Effortlessly funny and informative... tender, human, and very wise... A must for anyone who loves Jeopardy!, or has ever seen it, or is breathing."

-- Joss Whedon, creator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

"I haven't seen Jeopardy! since I was a kid, and yet I was charmed and amused by Bob Harris's fascinating and surprisingly suspenseful book. Through sheer force of personality, he takes this brainy TV show and makes it funny and easy to relate to."

-- Ira Glass, creator and host, This American Life

"A surprisingly intimate, entertaining book."

-- Orson Scott Card, 4-time Hugo Award winner, author of Ender's Game

"Funny, enlightening -- and just might help you win a million bucks on Jeopardy!"

-- A. J. Jacobs, author of The Know-It-All

"A masterful job of describing the feel of Jeopardy! in the heat of battle... I knew Bob was a great guy and a fantastic Jeopardy! player. Now I've found that he's also a wonderful writer. I think I'm starting to hate him."

-- Brad Rutter, top money-winner in Jeopardy! history

Books I'm Getting

Who Hates Whom:
Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts,
and Various Things Blowing Up —
A Woefully Incomplete Guide™

“Revelatory... Harris's sly wit and infectious curiosity make understanding world chaos fascinating... witty, horrific, and necessary.”

— Boston Globe

"Brave... irreverent... charges into the thick of the globe's myriad simmering wars... hilariously relaxed."

— New York Observer

"Only Bob could make a user’s guide to our increasingly hostile world this absorbing, this breezy, and—ultimately—this hopeful.”

— Ken Jennings, author of Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs

“Fascinating, enlightening, and surprisingly: NOT TOTALLY DEPRESSING. A gimlet-eyed look at the world we endure that’s also suitable for enjoying with a gimlet.”

— John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise
and correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

"All three [presidential] candidates should read all three of these [recommended] books, but McCain gets first crack at Bob Harris's "Who Hates Whom“... a lighthearted overview of the insurrections and civil wars in the world today."

— Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought, in the New York Times Book Review

Main

Adbusters

Closed-captioning the National Spelling Bee

Tag it now -

Friday, 03 June 2005

Watched the big Spelling Bee on tape last night.

(This was just a few nights after watching the Geography Bee, hosted with great delight by a certain formerly-mustachioed fellow I'm rather fond of. Yes, I am a geek. But you knew that.)

Obviously, it's a lot of fun to play along, watching these genius preteens easily parse words which sound like completely random noises made as a joke by drunken illiterates with no teeth. These were actual words, my hand to god:

Oligopsony
Agnolotti
Hooroosh
Gomphosis
Pronaos

All of which these kids spelled correctly. While barely even blinking.

When Samir Patel, an adorable fetus from Fort Worth, was given Hooroosh, he looked absolutely delighted. Because he knew the word, people. Apparently, he walks around Fort Worth tugging on people's pantlegs and using the word Hooroosh in sentences all the time.

That's just not natural.

Pretty soon I felt dwarfed by these blastocysts in khaki pants. So the mind wanders... and, hey...

Say, how the hell do you closed-caption a contest involving so many nearly-impossible words?

Answer: you don't. You can't.

So this is what they do, and it makes the competition even more fun to watch, especially as the word gets repeated back and forth by the contestant and the judge, while the player studies the pronounciation, considers the derivation, and sometimes just stalls for damn time:

[Word.]

[Word?]

[Word.]

What part of speech is it?

[Word] is a noun. [Word.]

[Word?]

Yes. [Word.]

Are there any alternate pronounciations?

There are three pronounciations: [Word] or [Word] and the slight variant [Word].

And so on. And all the while, you can see the glowing lights bouncing back and forth in their little Cylon brains as they gradually hone in on another impossible spelling of a word they've probably never seen:

[Worrrrd.]

[Wurrd?]

No, [Worrrrd.]

Can I have the derivation?

[Worrrrd] is from the Sanskrit, with a Choctaw combining form.

Oh. Of course. [Worrrrd.]

[Worrrrd.] Yes.

Can you use it in a sentence?

Yes. "When Dwight first encountered Ishtar, he made an enormous [worrrd] in his pants."

Oh! [Worrrrd.] OK.

[Worrrrd.] You have thirty seconds.

Does that include the Mandarin diminutive suffix [-rrrd], meaning a very small clenching noise?

And so on, until the kid somehow spits the thing out, damn near every single time.

I am in awe.

This is the actual list of words that the winning kid pulled out:

Cabochon
Priscilla
Oligopsony
Sphygmomanometer
Prosciutto
Rideau
Pompier
Terete
Tristachyous
Schefflera
Ornithorhynchous
Agio
Agnolotti
Peccavi
Ceraunograph
Exsiccosis
Hodiernal
Appoggiatura

And here's the kicker: I just tried to congratulate the winner from memory... and honest to God, I can't even spell the kid's name.

Congratulations, Anurag Kashyap of San Diego, California.

You rool.