![]() “Our raison d’etre was to teach spellers a rich vocabulary that they could use in their daily lives. Trinkle, who joined the panel in 1997, used to produce the majority of her submissions by reading periodicals like The New Yorker or The Economist. The group includes five former champions: Barrie Trinkle (1973), Bailly, George Thampy (2000), Sameer Mishra (2008) and Shivashankar. The positions are filled via word of mouth within the spelling community or recommendations from panelists. This year’s meeting includes five full-time bee staffers and 16 contract panelists. I was just told, ‘You’re the new Harvey.’” It’s Not Just Picking Words “Harvey … made the whole list,” Bailly says. Bailly, the 1980 champion, joined in 1991. The current collaborative approach didn’t take shape until the early ’90s. From 1961 to 1984, according to James Maguire’s book American Bee, creating the list was a one-man operation overseen by Jim Wagner, a Scripps Howard editorial promotions director, and then by Harvey Elentuck, a then-MIT student who approached Wagner about helping with the list in the mid-1970s. The panel’s work has changed over the decades. “Nice word, but bye-bye,” pronouncer Kevin Moch says.įor the panelists, the meeting is the culmination of a yearlong process to assemble a word list that will challenge but not embarrass the 230 middle- and elementary-school-aged competitors - and preferably produce a champion within the two-hour broadcast window for Thursday night’s finals. Shivashankar says the near-homonym makes the word too confusing, and the rest of the panel quickly agrees to spike gleyde altogether. The word gleyde (pronounced “glide”), which means a decrepit old horse and is only used in Britain, has a near-homonym - glyde - with a similar but not identical pronunciation and a different meaning. Kavya Shivashankar, the 2009 champion, an obstetrician/gynecologist and a recent addition to the panel, chimed in with an objection. That’s what happened late in Sunday’s meeting. Hearing the words aloud with the entire panel present - laptops open to Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged dictionary - sometimes illuminates problems.
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