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A Japanese exchange student named Yuki attended her first American spelling bee. She sat in the audience, increasingly bewildered.
“Why is this a competition?” she whispered to her host mother.
“To find the best speller.”
“But in Japanese, if you hear a word, you know how to write it. Every kana represents exactly one sound. There is no ambiguity.”
“Well, English has a rich history—”
“The first word was ‘pharaoh.’ P-H-A-R-A-O-H. The child asked for the definition and the language of origin. For a spelling competition. Of his own language.”
The host mother nodded. “That’s standard.”
“Standard that children must ask which language their own word came from in order to spell it correctly?”
“Yes.”
The next word was ‘rendezvous.’ R-E-N-D-E-Z-V-O-U-S.
“That’s French,” said Yuki. “You borrowed it and kept the French spelling. Why not spell it the way it sounds? ‘Rondayvoo’?”
“We tried that once,” said the host mother. “It was the 1906 Simplified Spelling Board. Theodore Roosevelt supported it. Congress blocked it.”
“So a former president of the United States tried to fix English spelling, and the government stopped him.”
“Yes.”
“And now children stand on a stage and cry over words their ancestors borrowed and refused to adapt.”
“Well—”
“In Japan,” said Yuki, “a spelling bee would last four minutes. Because every word in the language is spelled exactly the way it sounds. This is not a competition. This is a symptom.”
I read this and laughed. Then I looked across the kitchen at my daughter, who was on her third attempt at spelling “recumbentibus,” and I stopped laughing.
You want to talk about spelling bees that only English needs? I will tell you about the one happening in my kitchen every Thursday night. The prize is not a trophy. The prize is that my twelve-year-old gets to go to bed before 10 PM.
Here is the thing about spelling bees: they celebrate exactly the wrong thing. They celebrate memorization. They do not celebrate understanding. My daughter can spell “jargogle” now—she practiced for an hour—but she could not tell you a single sentence where it would actually help her communicate something. Because there is not one.
English spelling is broken. We agree on this. But instead of fixing it, we turned the brokenness into a competition and gave children trophies for navigating it. That is not education. That is Stockholm syndrome.
And no, before you ask: my daughter did not pass. She got “crapulous” wrong. She spelled it with one ‘p.’ I do not blame her. Nobody needs two ‘p’s in a word that nobody needs at all.
— Michael Nguyen, father of a spelling bee survivor
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