About month ago I reported on Yulkendy Valdez’s attempt to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington DC. Well, sadly, Yulkendy didn’t manage to win. Instead, as broadcast by npr news, Kavya Shivashankar from Kansas triumphed over 292 other participants to take home the competition trophy and a cash prize of $40,000!
Somewhat bizarrely, this year the words were presented in the form of joke sentences! Targeting the word ‘apodyterium’, a room in an ancient Greek bathhouse, the prompt sentence went: ‘It was always a challenge to tell whose toga http://literacyblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/spelling-bee-final-won-by-kavya-from.htmlwas whose in the apodyterium.’
Other words included: ‘geusioleptic’, ‘menhir’, and, the one on which Kavya won her laurels, ‘Laodicean’, which, in case you didn’t already know, means ‘Lukewarm, neither hot nor cold’, according to my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.
According the Scripps website, the first winner of the competition in 1925, Frank Neuhauser, has just turned ninety-five and planned to attend this year’s contest.