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Jun. 2nd, 2006 12:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
novapsycheTonight I thought about going to see The Purple Rose of Cairo, which was playing at the Michigan Theatre. Jeff Daniels was to be there after the showing to take questions from the audience. But I dilly-dallied. So instead I watched the national spelling bee, broadcast live.
It was interesting to see the strategies of the spellers. They were allowed to ask five questions of their given word: its definition, its origin/etymology, its part of speech, if there were any alternate pronunciations, and how it could be used in a sentence. It was telling when someone didn't know anything about the word because they asked questions that weren't useful. They were asking the questions just to game for time.
As someone who has won and lost spelling bees, I can say that there is a feeling in the body altogether different when you don't know a word but can tease it out possibly by gaining clues as opposed to when you're terrified by a word or just blanked out by it.
I learned some lovely words: mithraeum, coryphaeus, heiligenschein, weltschmerz, and ursprache.
Now, for Countdown.
It was interesting to see the strategies of the spellers. They were allowed to ask five questions of their given word: its definition, its origin/etymology, its part of speech, if there were any alternate pronunciations, and how it could be used in a sentence. It was telling when someone didn't know anything about the word because they asked questions that weren't useful. They were asking the questions just to game for time.
As someone who has won and lost spelling bees, I can say that there is a feeling in the body altogether different when you don't know a word but can tease it out possibly by gaining clues as opposed to when you're terrified by a word or just blanked out by it.
I learned some lovely words: mithraeum, coryphaeus, heiligenschein, weltschmerz, and ursprache.
Now, for Countdown.