Spelling Bee Protestors

WASHINGTON – The nation's capital always draws its share of protesters, picketing for causes ranging from health care reform to immigration policy.

But spelling bee protesters? They're out here, too.

Four peaceful protesters, some dressed in full-length black and yellow bee costumes, represented the American Literacy Council and the London-based Spelling Society and stood outside the Grand Hyatt on Thursday, where the Scripps National Spelling Bee is being held. Their message was short: Simplify the way we spell words.

Roberta Mahoney, 81, a former Fairfax County, Va. elementary school principal, said the current language obstructs 40 percent of the population from learning how to read, write and spell.

"Our alphabet has 425-plus ways of putting words together in illogical ways," Mahoney said.

The protesting cohort distributed pins to willing passers-by with their logo, "Enuf is enuf. Enough is too much."

According to literature distributed by the group, it makes more sense for "fruit" to be spelled as "froot," "slow" should be "slo," and "heifer" — a word spelled correctly during the first oral round of the bee Thursday by Texas competitor Ramesh Ghanta — should be "hefer."

Meanwhile, inside the hotel's Independence Ballroom, 273 spellers celebrated the complexity of the language in all its glory, correctly spelling words like zaibatsu, vibrissae and biauriculate.

While the protesters could make headway with cell phone texters who routinely swap "u" for "you" and "gr8" for "great," their message may be a harder sell for the Scripps crowd.

Mahoney had trouble gaining traction with at least one bee attendee. New Mexico resident Matthew Evans, 15, a former speller whose sister is participating in the bee this year, reasoned with her that if English spellings were changed, spelling bees would cease to exist.

"If a dictionary lists 'enough' as 'enuf,' the spelling bee goes by the dictionary, therefore all the spelling words are easier to spell, so the spelling bee is gone," Evans said.

"Well," Mahoney replied, "they could pick their own dictionary."


When I was told about this article by my English teacher, my first instinct was to laugh it off. People protesting the English language? In this day and age, protests don't have the weight that they used to have, especially considering protests such as those made by the Tea Party of America that don't really have more of a purpose than getting a bunch of angry people together and screaming. But as I read this article, I was mildly surprised to learn that my pessimistic instincts had failed me, and that this wasn't quite as ridiculous as I thought. Well, it was, just in a more logical way than I thought.

The protest was lead by an 81 year old teacher who was convinced that words in the English language could be spelled illogically, and thus people should not be held to those impossible standards. This confused me. Why should a teacher, of all the people in the world, be so against teaching things about the English language because it was "too confusing"? How was 40% (which is a made-up number if I have ever seen one) be held down by getting confused by silent letters?

Personally, I blame the world we live in today. Our culture's obsession with saying that it's okay to be close, and doing whatever it can to convince people that they're not stupid for not knowing how to spell "enough" is very nice, and really should be perfect, but it's not. It seems to be creating a certain sense of complacency, that people are now fighting to make the official way things in the United States are done.

And what of other confusing subjects? Can we simplify math, too? Chemistry? History? Why can't we simplify all subjects? The truth of the matter is, despite the good will shown at this protest, it simply does not work with how the world we live in works. People can complain all they want about how the world works, but some things are just not going to change because a very small group of people complained about it.