Henrietta Hay's Column

OK, kids. If you're so smart, can you spell "quinquagenary?" Well, I can't either. It is one of the words that tripped up one of the finalists in the 1988 National Spelling Bee. How about a couple others, like coelacanth or teonacat, or even redundancy or sphinx?

Spelling bees are usually the domain of tense and self-conscious school kids. Recently, however, a bunch of big kids whose school days are behind them put themselves through the same torture at a Big Kids Spelling Bee. Local companies and organizations entered teams, and I still can't believe I was on one of them.

Now all this was in the name of good clean fun. We thought we were there to have a good time, but suddenly the old competitive spirit kicked in and it turned into a real contest. After all, as somebody said, if winning isn't important, why bother to keep score? For the record, my team did not win. We was robbed!

As we milled around waiting for the big event to begin, most of us were trying to figure out how the world we allowed ourselves to get dragged into this, And of course we got to discussing spelling bees past.

I suspect that my school days are more distant than those of any other contestants. After all, when I went to grade school Indians were roaming the streets of Englewood and the covered wagons still dropped by now and then on their way to California. I don't remember any spelling bees, but I do remember a couple of grade school teachers whose whole reason for living was to pound spelling into my reluctant head. They were without mercy and they did a pretty good job.

Other much younger contestants whose school memories are still fresh remembered spelling bees all too well. Two young women admitted to the unspeakable crime of deliberately misspelling a word once just to be able to end the agony and sit down. One man was trying to psych out his opponents by bragging about the fact that he got as far as the state meet not too many years ago. Another team brought a cheering section that reminded me of Bronco Mania. And then there was Winnie the Pooh, who complained that, "My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places."

English is the second most commonly spoken language in the world, in spite of its weird spelling. After all, a language that contains rein, reign and rain; and bear, the animal and bear, to carry, does create some confusion. Even the words used to describe those inconsistencies are confusing. One is a homophone and one is a homograph. We still have several words that have survived from a language split c. 3500 B.C. According to the experts, about 40 words of a pre-Indo-European substratum are still in use, among them apple (apal), bad (bad) and gold (gol).

Melvill Dewey, who invented the Dewey Decimal System still used in libraries, did not think highly of English spelling, so he invented his own. He decided to make the whole thing sensible and spell phonetically. He even changed his name to Melvil Dui. In the introduction to his system, he says, "The plan of this Clasification and Index was developt erly in 1873...Any sistem of catalogs may be uzed with this skeme, but the 2 essentials of even the simplest sistem ar name or author catalog and shelflist."

Some words would defy even Melvil Dui. There is one modern historical figure we might prefer to forget. The "mad dog" of Lebanon has been spelled Qaddhafi (New York Review of Books), Gaddafi (Time), Kaddafi (Newsweek), Qadhafi (U.S.News & World Report), Qadaffi (Business Week), and as many other ways as there are magazines. To make matters worse, the Library of Congress uses Qadhdhafi. This upset William Safire so much that he said, "...I am thinking about issuing a ukase on the spelling of our fricative friends!" I'm not sure how much that will help.

The next time I am tempted to enter a spelling bee, I will read this little verse of George E. Coon's:

"I herd that gnus with grate delite

I will study homophones both day and knight.

For weaks and months, through thick oar thin,

"I'll pursue my goal. Eye no aisle win."