Yet another homeschooler won the National Spelling Bee this year. Which proves that if you get to choose how to spend your time studying, you too might just win $35,000 cash, a $5,000 scholarship, a $2,500 savings bond and a set of encyclopedias.

I never was good at spelling. Fortunately, about the same time I needed to start writing intelligible papers, the blessed SpellCheck arrived on our home computers. (For instance, I just guessed at “intelligible” back there, and Firefox told me how to spell it. Firefox! A web browser! It’s still having conniptions–again, pure guess–about “homeschooler,” which I consciously misspell to make a point, and “SpellCheck,” which has simply received a holy oneness for me.

My school, which had a total of 32 students at its height when I attended, had a weekly spelling bee with all of the students, each getting a word at his own grade level, though if he missed it, the word could decimate the ranks as it proceeded upward through the grades. Out of years of this nonsense, I managed to win the bee, a tiny black and yellow stuffed animal to keep on one’s desk all week, only ONCE. And I’m still unconvinced that there wasn’t actually a conspiracy to let me win because everyone felt sorry for me, too. I kicked ass in the geography tournaments, but spelling? Sigh.

Interestingly, English speakers are pretty much the only folks who engage in spelling bees. The rest of the world’s languages are phonetic or pictorial, so there’s no need.

Here’s a fascinating article about what linguistic competitions people in other language groups engage in. For instance, the Chinese have dictionary flipping contests, which if you think about it, is pretty difficult if you don’t have an alphabet.