Humbled as a Spelling Pronouncer

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And I mentioned at the top of the show that I served recently as the pronouncer for a regional spelling bee here in San Diego.

And, you know, when they first invited me, I thought, great, that’ll be a fun morning.

Grant, I had no idea what I was getting into.

But you have great pronunciation. You’re constantly helping me out when I go astray. You just sound fantastic.

You do professional reading.

Well, thank you, Grant. The thing is that there were hundreds and hundreds of words that I had to pronounce exactly correctly for the competitors.

And, you know, yeah, I went into it thinking, you know, this is going to be a breeze. I can read Latin. I can read Greek.

Grant and I have been doing A Way with Words for years and years now. Words are what you and I do all the time.

Right. Right?

How did it go?

I have a much better appreciation, for one thing, for how the students spend hours and hours working with all these words to understand their meaning and where they come from and how to spell and how to pronounce them.

It’s a massive amount of work.

And what this process made me realize is that English is this big, wide, wonderful language, and it’s absolutely voracious.

It gobbles up words from everywhere about food, about weather, about philosophical concepts and forms of transportation and lots of plants and animals.

And Grant, there were so many words in this huge study guide that I did not know.

Oh, that’s not a surprise. English is ridiculous. English should not be allowed, frankly.

Well, and on the one hand, it was intimidating, but on the other hand, it is very exciting to think about all these concepts and ideas and things that I didn’t know about.

But also, so many times I would look at a word I’d never seen before, and I would feel pretty confident that I could work out what the pronunciation was.

But no, so many times what I guess the pronunciation was was flat out wrong.

And one other thing I want to say, Grant, is that in this study guide of hundreds and hundreds of words, there were words that I did know, of course, and that I thought I knew very well.

But then I learned from studying these words that I had been mispronouncing at least three of them for years.

Now you know how I feel when you tell me that.

Over our time together, you have gently said, Grant, I think it’s pronounced blah, blah, blah.

And I’m like, oh, she’s done it again.

But, you know, I remember you corrected me on the word piquant, which I’ve always said as piquant.

And it’s sort of like when you’re in a spelling bee and you go out on a word that you spell incorrectly, you never forget it.

Oh, you remember it because you have great pronunciation.

For me, it happens all the time. I can’t possibly remember all the time if my pronunciation is corrected.

Well, you know, what I was reminded of, Grant, was the fact that you and I have talked many times about how there’s really no shame in mispronouncing a word that you’ve learned only through reading.

Right. You know, it just it means that you’re a well-read person.

Yeah, your reading is ahead of your ears. Your eyes are ahead of your ears.

And that’s a great place to be. The brain is working hard.

Right.

Well, bravo to the participants. I know that they worked their behinds off on that.

Behinds.

And what was the spelling bee again?

This was the San Diego County Scripps Regional Spelling Bee.

And the winner goes on to the National Spelling Bee.

Oh, fantastic.

Well, bravo and brava to all the participants. We’re happy that you’ve made this choice in your life to be word nerds.

And we love to hear from our fellow word nerds.

No matter where you are in the world, you can email us or find other ways to reach us on our website at waywordradio.org.