Spelling Bee draws protestors

[THUNDERDUCK]

WASHINGTON – The nation's capital always draws its share of protesters, picketing for causes ranging from health care reform to immigration policy.

But spelling bee protesters? They're out here, too.

Four peaceful protesters, some dressed in full-length black and yellow bee costumes, represented the American Literacy Council and the London-based Spelling Society and stood outside the Grand Hyatt on Thursday, where the Scripps National Spelling Bee is being held. Their message was short: Simplify the way we spell words.

Roberta Mahoney, 81, a former Fairfax County, Va. elementary school principal, said the current language obstructs 40 percent of the population from learning how to read, write and spell.

"Our alphabet has 425-plus ways of putting words together in illogical ways," Mahoney said.

The protesting cohort distributed pins to willing passers-by with their logo, "Enuf is enuf. Enough is too much."

According to literature distributed by the group, it makes more sense for "fruit" to be spelled as "froot," "slow" should be "slo," and "heifer" — a word spelled correctly during the first oral round of the bee Thursday by Texas competitor Ramesh Ghanta — should be "hefer."

Meanwhile, inside the hotel's Independence Ballroom, 273 spellers celebrated the complexity of the language in all its glory, correctly spelling words like zaibatsu, vibrissae and biauriculate.

While the protesters could make headway with cell phone texters who routinely swap "u" for "you" and "gr8" for "great," their message may be a harder sell for the Scripps crowd.

Mahoney had trouble gaining traction with at least one bee attendee. New Mexico resident Matthew Evans, 15, a former speller whose sister is participating in the bee this year, reasoned with her that if English spellings were changed, spelling bees would cease to exist.

"If a dictionary lists 'enough' as 'enuf,' the spelling bee goes by the dictionary, therefore all the spelling words are easier to spell, so the spelling bee is gone," Evans said.

"Well," Mahoney replied, "they could pick their own dictionary."

[twissie]

 

I'm all for having language evolve and change, it's something that happens all the time and we're usually not even aware of it happening, but this...? Protesting the Spelling Bee contest... lololol.

[Amplifier]

I find this :doh:ingly silly. Not that English isn't headed in the direction they described..

What does twissie think of the Norwegian Language struggle?

[twissie]

What does twissie think of the Norwegian Language struggle?

Well that happened ages ago xD; Of course we're still dealing with the repercussions. I was taught both Bokmål and Nynorsk in school, though Nynorsk only for a couple of years during secondary and upper secondary. *shrug* Nynorsk has more focus on gendered words, and the conjugations look different... my Norwegian dialect is pretty close to Bokmål, so that's what comes natural to me anyway. I didn't do too well with Nynorsk in school, but I don't think we should stop teaching it.

What people should stop doing, though, is trying to write Norwegian in their own dialects it's incredibly ugly, and so difficult to read for the "outsiders". Norway's got two official written languages, there's really no need to try and make up your own. Fffff. xD

[Amplifier]

As long as they keep up writing with the Æ/Ø/Å, it's allll good

Video mildly related to topic:

[twissie]

^
I Ut i vår hage and their skits forever. Had a plan once of subbing Ut i vår hage clips, but then realised that most of their skits rely heavily on Norwegian language/culture knowledge... so subbing would be, uhm difficult. Puns never work out that well, and who likes to read several pages of footnotes with their humour clips? xD hahaha.

Also.. DANISH

[Amplifier]

I mistook Danish for German at times

http://www1.nrk.no/nett-tv/klipp/16920

Apparently you can watch every episode online free

[twissie]

^
Yes, I know! NRK has awesome net-tv services (apart from using windows media as their media player  ) It's a great place to go for documentaries as well! True Blood was available to watch there, and sometimes they put up films too. Aaah NRK 

[Amplifier]

I just finished that first episode of the show. What the shit did I just watch?

[twissie]

^
Best Norwegian skit show ever, probably.

[Maruku84]

ok that has to be the most ridiculous idea ever, help americans become more lazy. thats all we need

[Tuffty]

Roberta Mahoney, 81, a former Fairfax County, Va. elementary school principal, said the current language obstructs 40 percent of the population from learning how to read, write and spell.

Fuck off. Like, seriously fuck off. You're a goddamn teacher and you're advocating for incorrect spelling? I can't stand textspeak, it's essentially dumbing down, and if you want to put it into the curriculum you're only sending humanity further down the stupidity ladder.

[twissie]

^

Yeah seriously... o_o

current language obstructs 40 percent of the population from learning how to read, write and spell.

This makes no sense what so ever. How does language itself obstruct people from learning how to read, write, and spell? If people are unable to learn these things now, surely it must be because of the teachers / weird school reforms or... SOMETHING. ... what does 'current language' refer to anyway? xD derpaderp.

[Amplifier]

^

Yeah seriously... o_o

current language obstructs 40 percent of the population from learning how to read, write and spell.

This makes no sense what so ever. How does language itself obstruct people from learning how to read, write, and spell? If people are unable to learn these things now, surely it must be because of the teachers / weird school reforms or... SOMETHING. ...

It's funny, because I was always under the impression the United States had a near 100% literacy rate. It's even the same rate in countries with (relatively) complex languages like Finland and Japan. Add on that English is so widely spoken around the world as a second language, and..

what does 'current language' refer to anyway? xD

Woah. Woah. I don't think a fair number of EMMURICANS can understand that concept.

derpaderp.

I see it was a problem of kids not being given enough encouragement to do well from multiple sources, and a watering-down of standards. Instead of raising the bar, they've lowered it so everyone can feel shiny and sparkly about passing stupid standardized exams. I finished school right as my former school was implementing a lot of that shit for real at the classroom level (under pressure from the government). Some bizarre portion of the students in the graduating class right after mine had 4.0 GPAs I believe, thanks to this (as in, 100% scores on everything). Better still, looking at results for school districts in my area, typically ~20% of students didn't pass the state-wide standardized reading/writing/math exams.

[adventwriter]

Maybe if the damn teachers taught them more than just a stupid standardized test - then maybe the people wouldn't have as hard a time. I really don't get this anti-intellect movement going on in America right now.... people here are already dumb enough to begin with - and getting dumber by the year.

[strawb3rrykream]

I think that dude's idea is absolutely ridiculous! Just makes Americans look more stupid in the eyes of the rest of the world. I admit, I use textspeak on occasion but I do, in fact, spell things like "you" and "are" out completely all the time.
I was just thinking about the decline of American education today. Being a student myself, I know there are kids that work extremely hard and are incredibly smart. But at the same time, there are tons of kids who don't give a shit about learning, and adults that don't give a shit about whether they learn or not. I feel like the world's problems can possibly be fixed by these future generations, if we're given the chance.
Just my thoughts on the subject.

[tru_harmony]

i think some people tend to disregard the benefits of the actual process of learning more difficult and complicated things

because to some people standardized tests seem to be the goal of everything, they want to learn WHAT'S IN THE TEST easier

so they study not to learn but just to pass the tests... so they take shortcuts...

just the values that you unconsciously learn from truly studying hard can get you through any test, i think

then again, the rest of society wouldn't care if you are patient, persevering, persistent, consistent, etc...

so sad, i think

[Naomi]

ok that has to be the most ridiculous idea ever, help americans become more lazy. thats all we need

It's not laziness, especially considering spelling "enough" doesn't require much effort. I think the protestors wanted to make things less confusing, not get everyone to become lazy.

I was actually just thinking about this, but to be honest, I don't mind all of the weird spellings, because "enuf" looks very weird.

[sanzoku]

Its wayy too late to change stuff like this now. Especially since America isn't the only country speaking english. Imagine if it changed, and you were trying to read a magazine. In my head I would read like it was a dumb person talking because I'm so used to the regular spellings. It would get pretty annoying.

[twissie]

Norway introduced standardised tests a couple of years back, and now suddenly we get news every so often about how kids can't read. Now, either this was a problem that didn't get picked up on earlier because we didn't have a way of testing every kid in the country at the same time and compare them before, or the way of teaching changed to make sure kids performed well for these tests (as the tests are actually used to check the level of education at the schools, every year rankings appear with what school performed best in what subject etc). @_@; I'm so glad I finished my lower education before these tests were introduced. As we all know (?), stuff you cram into your head for tests rarely stay there afterwards. :/