Not what you would expect when the stakes are so high:
The favorite entering the bee after his runner-up finish last year — during which he never misspelled a word in a conventional spelling round, only to lose a lightning-round tiebreaker that he didn’t practice for — the shaggy-haired Faizan wore the burden of expectations lightly, sauntering to the microphone in a black hoodie and spelling his words with casual glee.
By Sydney Bishop and Christina Maxouris, CNN (5/31/24)
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Bruhat Soma, 12, of Florida won the 96th Scripps National Spelling Bee Thursday night after defeating all seven other finalists and beating his final competitor in the Bee’s second-ever spell-off.
Bruhat spelled 29 words correctly during that spell-off, while 12-year-old Faizan Zaki of Texas, spelled 20 words correctly. The two shared a handshake after Bruhat was announced this year’s champion.
The 2023 Scripps National Spelling Bee ended the old-fashioned way.
Two competitors left on the stage. No spell-off required.
Dev Shah, an eighth-grader from Largo, Florida, spelled "psammophile" correctly to win the 95th national Bee and the 50,000 dollar prize on Thursday. Charlotte Walsh, the hometown kid from just across the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia, could not nail "daviely" in the preceding round. Walsh's prize was 25,000 dollars for the second-place finish, while the third-place finishers ― Shradha Rachamreddy and Surya Kapu ― each won 12,500 dollars.
This report can be relatively perfunctory, because the results are almost always a foregone conclusion. After a hiatus because of the pandemic lockdowns and then an incredible shocker last year (see "Selected readings" below), there are basically no surprises… though the format has evolved.
The new thing this time was a "spell-off" that kicked in if no winner came out after a certain number of rounds. It was hard to bring the previous bees to a conclusive end because the participants were so consummately well prepared — there was an 8-way tie in 2019. I like the new format because, not only does it eliminate overly long proceedings and multiple ties, it also adds an element of extra drama and speed to the finale. The unsurprising thing this year was that 11 out of 13 finalists looked to be of Indian origin. (source)
Fig. 1 Standard (left) and prizewinning creative kanji for “to sit.”
The character (in both its standard and creative forms) is made up of three elements:
广
土
人
Of these, it is the last that is subtly manipulated here. That element, also an independent kanji in its own right, means “person.” By moving the two “people” apart, the contest winner expressed the idea of “sitting apart,” or social distancing.
Like so many other good things in this annus horribilis, COVID killed it.
For quite a few years now, I have reported on the national spelling bee (usually in May). This has been such a dismal year that I didn't make an effort to inquire about what happened with it this spring. Now, however, as I am preparing a post on Indian feats of memorization, I could not help but wonder about the fate of the 2020 national spelling bee. Here's what I found out.
The buzzwords of the year (Shingo/Ryūkōgo Taishō 新語・流行語大賞) have been announced. As Nathan Hopson, who called the results to my attention, puts it:
With the caveat that this is a contest run by a private company that publishes an annual collection of new and important words, and that there's a lot of peripheral annoyance around the biases this seems to create, there are always a few interesting terms.
This year's winner was "sodane〜 そだね〜" ("that's right〜" ), the kawaii (the culture of cuteness) shortened form of sōdesune そうですね ("I agree; that's right; that's so, isn't it; hmm"), one of my favorite Japanese expressions, popularized during the Pyeongchang Olympics broadcasts of the Japanese women's curling team.
