Don't know where it came from - it sounds too good to be true - but here's a 911 recording bouncing around the Internet:
"911, what's your emergency?"
"Yeah, my wife got attacked by a warthog real bad and I need someone to come up with an ambulance and pick her up."
"OK, sir, can you give me your address?"
"Yeah, we're at 1825 Eucalyptus Drive."
"OK, can you spell that for me, sir?"
Long pause.
"Oh, I'm going to drag her on over to Oak Street and you can pick her up there."
Which should be all the proof you need that spelling is important.
I was a judge at a spelling bee the other day. Felt like a total faker. Asking me to judge a spelling bee is like hiring Charlie Sheen as your life skills coach.
Indeed, newspaper writers are to spelling what road salt is to an undercarriage. I worked with one reporter who wrote of a "bonified" hockey player (who had, apparently, been filleted) and another who referred to the Strait of Wanda Fuca (presumably the first woman to swim to Port Angeles).
Some journalists try to pass off this failing as a mere peccadillo (one of Saturday's bee words). "Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma'ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world," declared H.L. Mencken.
But that just reads like an excuse. If someone can t even get the spelling right, how can you trust him with the facts?
It's not just spelling, but language in general. My paper once ran this photo cutline: "Above, Mary Smith prepares her vegetables before being baked in the oven."
We are regularly berated by language lovers who see the newspaper as a crumbling last bastion in an illiterate world being overrun by Sarah Palin and Twitter, a generation of chimpanzees thumb-
drumming their iPhones:
"Where r u?" or, worse, "Wear r u?"
A reader berated me last year for referring to the two little dots over the "e" in Michalle Jean as an umlaut, as opposed to a diaeresis, which I thought was what you got after eating an umlaut made with rotten eggs.
Another reader recently wrote in to lament the abuse of the adverb, about being told to "go slow" and "drive safe" instead of slowly and safely.
Another complained about our choice of "one of the only" over "one of the few."
Many worry that the rules of punctuation have been all but forgotten.
(Indeed, had I appreciated the difference between "You never call me anymore" and "You, never call me anymore" I might have avoided an awkward discussion with the police and subsequent restraining order.) The "use" of quotations "marks" also drives people nuts.
And no one knows how to use an apostrophe anymore (mens room, indeed). My boss actually killed a reporter who repeatedly confused it's with its, though we were encouraged not to reveal this.
The consensus (another of the bee words) is that the language is in freefall. Which brings us to the spelling bee.
The late Victoria Times columnist Jack Scott once wrote of a daily routine that included dropping off at school five small boys who were "somewhere between the ages of nine and 11, except for one, Artie, who is, I suspect, a 38-year-old midget."
I was reminded of that line at the bee. My antennae were raised when Nicole Williams, ostensibly an 11-year-old Grade six student, nailed sitzmark (defined as the depression left in the snow by a skier falling backward) with suspicious ease. My radar continued to ping as the other 60 entrants spelled words that should have been beyond any child. With the language dying, they just had to be adults.
Or perhaps, contrary to conventional wisdom, the kids are all right. Or the kidz r all write.
