2:16am April 30, 2015

If you ever did a spelling bee, reblog with the word you got out on.

codeman38:

autismgender:

Because you NEVER forget that shit.

Mine was “forestall.” (I forgot the E. I was eleven and had never heard that word before since “delay” was good enough for me.)

First: “Referee”, at my first county spelling bee. My brain got ahead of my mouth, so I started spelling “F-E-R”. You can’t go back and correct yourself if you say a wrong letter, so that got me out.

Last: “Doyen”, at the national bee. They gave a definition specifically indicating that it meant the senior male member of a group. I’d never seen the word in the masculine form, only in the feminine (doyenne), so I had wrongly assumed the latter was gender-neutral. It wasn’t.

(Yes, for those who don’t know, I was in the nationals over half my life ago. That’s where the 38 in my username came from–it was my placard number in that bee, I created an AIM name with it, and it just kind of stuck around as my online identity since then.)

Grotto.

Not only did I get out on that, but other kids were like “How did you get out on such an easy word?”

Simple.  I’d never heard it said out loud.

So I spelled it grato, assuming it was some kind of musical term, where there are words that contain that kind of spelling.

What pissed me off the most was that as soon as I learned the right spelling, I knew the word.  There was a room called “Crystal Grotto” in Zork.  I went there often.

But I never heard it said out loud until the spelling bee, so I made no connection.

Either way, I didn’t know what a grotto was.  But that’s another story.

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