Have you ever watched a game show — “Who Wants to be a Millionaire,” for example — when a contestant incorrectly answers a question, and you say to yourself, “Jeez! Come on! I knew that! Who doesn’t? What a joker.”
Here’s one of those moments:
Catch that deer-in-the-headlights look on the kid’s face? Seems pretty clear he knew the answer, but rushed to respond and couldn’t take it back after his irrevocable “final answer.”
I’m guessing I was sporting that same look Wednesday night at the Catherine McAuley Center’s fourth annual CMC Spelling Bee at Xavier High School.
I was the official speller for The Gazette (read: “the person who talks into the microphone”). And we were sailing along, nailing words like “catechism,” “privilege” and “adjournment.”
No problems. I was feeling positively giddy about our chance to repeat as spelling bee champs.
Then came our moment of truth.
The word came: “Tragedienne.” It means “an actress especially noted for performing tragic roles.” I have a moderate background in theater, so I was instantly familiar with the word, but I had a moment’s hesitation on its spelling. (Another Gazette staffer, Rae Riebe, pointed out that the pronouncer’s sentence for “tragedienne” referenced pinup girl Betty Grable, hardly an actress specializing in tragic roles. She was correct, and that could have been our first sign of trouble.)
Anyway, our team — newsroom chief Steve Buttry, Faith and Values reporter Molly Rossiter and myself — huddled to clarify the spelling. We came to our conclusion (fairly confidently), and just as I prepared to step to the mic, someone told me, “It’s basically just the word tragedy with an -ienne ending.”
Uh-oh. I think that threw me. For some reason, I’ve always struggled to pronounce the word “tragedy.” A real tongue-twister, it is. That shouldn’t have meant I couldn’t spell it, or “tragedienne,” for that matter, but I made the mistake of saying it to myself under my breath.
I then stepped up and stumbled over the pronunciation once again, this time out loud. Then I blurted out my letter-by-letter whiff: “T-r-a-d-e-g-i-e-n-n-e. Tragedienne.”
Um, no. That’s not it. Gazette goes down.
We finished, I believe, fifth of the 10 teams entered.
It’s hard not to feel like a fool when you err on something you know. I felt I let my teammates down, too. But it happens. I suspect it happened to the other teams at the bee, too, when they missed their words.
It’s the glare of the spotlight. The heat of the moment.
Ah, well. Shake it off, Steve tells me. “Next year we reclaim the championship,” he said.
True enough. We had our fun, and benefitted a fine cause in the process. Plus, our kids and I had some fun bouncing words back and forth Wednesday night, a la “Akeelah and the Bee”:
True, my pride was wounded Wednesday night. But this, too, shall pass. And we’ll return.
We’re newspaper people, after all. We spellz real gud.
(Props to the winning team, too — a legal crew from Shuttleworth & Ingersoll. Runners-up last year, they deserved the crown in 2009.)
Today’s word of the day is:
The big event is Wednesday, April 22 at Xavier High School in Cedar Rapids, and as you may be aware, The Gazette is the defending bee champion. (We even have the trophy to prove it.)
That Dad 