Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 1, 1993 TAG: 9305010108
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: DONNA ALVIS-BANKS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
We were on a mission.
We were wired.
We were D-O-O-M-E-D.
Kathy Loan, Joanne Anderson and I were representing the Roanoke Times & World-News in the New River Valley Spelling Bee Friday.
It was a competition that had sounded too good to be true: "It's fun! It's easy! We give you the words to study!"
"Where do we sign up?" we asked.
Our newspaper put up the $200 entry fee, a donation to those wonderful literacy volunteers of the New River Valley chapter of Literacy Volunteers of America. The other sponsor was the Montgomery County Rotary Club.
We were all set.
A week later we received our information packet, complete with the 6,000 words we were expected to master.
Most of them we couldn't pronounce.
Cuirass. Euryphagous. Psammophile.
" Oolite!" I wailed. "What does that mean?"
Reporter Madelyn Rosenberg came to the rescue:
"That's easy," she said. " `Oolite' is the first two words to a Debbie Boone song: ` light up my life. . . .' "
There were others. We compiled a list of words and some obviously demiurgic (look that one up!) meanings:
Coosify: What your editor does to you if you don't meet your deadline.
Dompt: A German expletive.
Gater: The amount of time you have to wait before rushing the quarterback in touch football ("One gater, two gater, three gater").
Katzenjammer: A cat dressed for beddy-bye.
Lerot: French for "Leroy."
Quokka: Another German expletive.
Schuyt: Still another German expletive!
Roleo: A cheap Rolex look-alike.
Pleach: To beg and preach simultaneously (Pretty pleach!)
Washin: What your Maw does on Saturdays.
Nuque: French word for preparing dishes a la microwave.
After we had our fun, we got down to the serious studying.
My colleague Joanne actually tape-recorded the spellings and listened to them over and over.
Kathy went through the dictionary, checking definitions and pronunciations.
I coerced my husband, my children and my children's friends into calling out spelling words.
"Do you get money if you win, Mom?" my oldest son asked after I misspelled barbarism.
"No," I replied.
"Well, what do you get?"
"R-E-S-P-E-C-T!" I sang.
I think my friends Kathy and Joanne felt the same way.
"The other teams will probably pick on us," Kathy warned a couple of days before the competition. "We're the newspaper."
So when the big day finally got here, we were wired.
After all, we had a reputation to protect.
How were we to know it rested on five consonants and four vowels?
Actually, I was so nervous through the first three rounds I have absolutely no ideal what happened. Somehow we managed to spell words like lacteal, onslaught, addlepated, pulpiteering and compensable.
Somehow, we made it to the spell-off.
A silly childhood chant kept running through my head: "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."
Ha!
The word was limnology.
We spelled it l-i-m-b-n-o-l-o-g-y.
Jennifer Sutphin, Nancy Page and Kathy Poff of Valley-Wide Management Inc. spelled it correctly and captured first place.
We cheered for them.
The Roanoke Times & World-News finished a R-E-S-P-E-C-T-A-B-L-E second.
Kathy, Joanne and I hopped in my burgundy buggy with the catchy "DEDLINE" license tags and headed back to the newspaper office, all the while squawking, " Schuyt! Dompt! Quokka!"
by CNB