The word was urspracht. Or maybe it was ursprach. In any case, as I sat watching the finals of this year’s National Spelling Bee (televised, for the first time, in prime time), I listened as the proctor uttered a word I could only guess how to spell and certainly couldn’t define. After twelve anxious hours and nineteen grueling rounds over two days, after 273 whiz kids had vied for spelling glory, the contest was now down to two slightly woozy thirteen-year-olds: Finola Hackett of Alberta, Canada, and Katharine “Kerry” Close of Spring Lake. Finola had just slipped up on weltschmerz, erroneously substituting a v for the initial w. If Kerry could clinch the next word, the championship was hers.
When the proctor uttered the u-word, a small smile played around her lips. She seemed to savor the moment, like an Olympic diver lingering on the high board before executing a perfect reverse two-and-a-half somersault in the pike position. And then, fortifying herself with a deep breath, Kerry Close earned herself a place in spelling history with, as it turns out, ursprache, effectively demolishing my charade that I was a talented speller.
For years, I’d been the go-to girl when it came to the English language. Friends and colleagues would call me to ask if there was more than one s in occasionally or whether the word they were searching for was affect or effect. I steadfastly refused to enable my computer’s spell-check function and proofread my own work without a dictionary. But next to Kerry, I was a pretender, a washout, a wannabe. I had to meet her, to find out what sort of person casually reeled off words like chiragra, cucullate, and gobemouche.
So I am disarmed to find myself standing before what appears to be a perfectly normal teenager—Kerry turned fourteen last month and this month enters High Technology High School—with a broad smile and a slightly tentative handshake. Blond hair pushed casually behind her ears, she radiates a kind of all-American wholesomeness. We sit in the light-filled living room of her Spring Lake home, the very room in which she prepared for five consecutive National Spelling Bees, and she graciously offers me the secrets of her success. She insists that she is not, by nature, a preternaturally gifted speller—“not until I started studying for the spelling bee.” And she attributes her first appearance at the national bee in 2002 to “luck” (she’d won her school’s contest that year, which she’d entered only because it was mandatory, and then aced the local and regional bees as well).
In fact, her first national showing was less than stellar. “I was 91st out of 250,” she says, “but that just means I got out in the first round.” Her loss inspired her to return the following year. And then there was the lure of, well, celebrity. “The final rounds were televised on ESPN,” she says. “That was my goal—to get on TV.” Each year, she inched up in the ranks, coming in seventh last year before bailing out on laetrile. At that point, she was a year away from aging out of the bee. It was, as they might say on ESPN, crunch time.
So Kerry did what any natural competitor would do in her situation: She trained. Big-time. She studied Webster’s Third New International Dictionary—all 450,000 words—noting in her laptop any word she couldn’t spell. Then she set out to memorize the 10,000-word list. For ten months, she spent up to two hours a day bent over her lists. She never gave up, though her enthusiasm flagged, she says, “at the Ls.” When she’d mastered all the words that Webster’s could throw at her, she knew she had a slim shot at the title. “There’s always the possibility that, even if you’re one of the best spellers there, you could still get out fairly early,” she says. “So I didn’t really get my hopes up too much.”
At these words, my envy was replaced with admiration and not a little awe. This girl isn’t just smart; she’s hardworking, plucky, and even modest. In my mind, I happily cede the title of spelling guru to her. And then I ask what she’d like to be when she grows up.
“A journalist,” she says.
Can you spell running scared?
Leslie Garisto Pfaff is, at least for now, a contributing writer for New Jersey Monthly.