It happened to be the first word and it turned out to be a killer, so to speak. Yup, the debut offering in the fifth annual Junction Literacy & Youth Centres’ Spelling Bee Challenge at the Best Western Vernon Lodge on Wednesday morning was ‘assassin.’
And we initially spelled it right. Crime reporter Roger ‘Assassin’ Knox said he was certain it was right and we all agreed to go with what turned out to be the correct answer.
But somewhere around the third or fourth word of the first round, three of us (the three amigos or the three stooges, take your pick) started to think ‘assassin’ didn’t look right. So we crossed out an ‘s,’ I think the first one, and moved on, although looking back we were nervous about it.
Well, guess what? We, the three amigos, that is, were wrong, and that ended up being the only word out of 15 words in three rounds that we got wrong, eliminating us from being among the top two teams, who got them all right, forcing a tie-breaker that we should have, could have, and would have been a part of but………
Now it should be noted that we spelled Craigellachie, tzatziki and even mnemonic, in the tie-breaker round for all the good it did us, correctly so that we ended up in a three-way tie for third in a group that included the former champs the Queen Bees – which ain’t half bad.
But, but, but we had it and we changed it and we…..well you get the idea.
It helped a little bit to hear Murray Smith of the KPMG team say they had them all right too, at one time, but ended up changing three of them, or so he claims.
So it happens. You overthink the word. I find if you look at any word long enough it will look wrong, believe me I’m an editor, it happens (although just for the record for the kind woman who sends these columns back to me in the mail with all the mistakes circled, I purposely replace ‘have’ with ‘of’ because I write this piece in a colloquial manner to better relate to my readers on an informal basis like I’m talking to them, or at least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it, by the way do you like the column?)
Take a breath here.
Anyway it should be noted that Roger waited the obligatory 35 seconds before he posted his new claim to ‘assassin’ fame on Facebook. I’m a little worried about the division in the newsroom now, Roger and his assassin true believers and the, well, three stooges, er, I mean amigos.
And the fact that we’ve now gained runner-up status twice in the spelling bee and been forced to share the bronze medal with two others this time, doesn’t exactly dull the pain.
However, and I don’t know if Roger posted this fact or not on Facebook, but there’s a history to the big guy being sure about the spelling of a word in this same competition in the past.
The word was Tsawwassen and he was sure because he’d seen it a million times on highway signs. We trusted him. If memory serves he might have put in one too many of those darn consonants that pluralize things. And we lost, again.
This time, of course, he was right, and we ended up being wrong anyway.
Aaaaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhhhhhh. There may be one too many ‘a’s in that word so please forgive me and fight the urge to circle it and send it to me, he said bitterly.
Meanwhile we’ll try to be good sports about it, congratulations to the OC Egg Heads (nice name by the way), and I’ll try to maintain peace in the newsroom until next year when we’ll take another crack at it and, alas, likely come up short. Although I’m seriously considering dedicating five or 10 minutes a day for the next 52 weeks or so to work on spelling in the newsrooom.
OK, staff, the word is isochronous…..
– glenn@vernonmorningstar.com
