Get a damn life

[Hydrant]

I wish I had nothing better to do all day.



In DC, even the Spelling Bee draws protesters
Buzz up!102 votes Send
Email IM .Share
Facebook Twitter Delicious Digg Fark Newsvine Reddit StumbleUpon Technorati Yahoo! Bookmarks .Print ..By LAUREN SAUSSER, Associated Press Writer Lauren Sausser, Associated Press Writer – Thu Jun 3, 3:55 pm ET
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."



http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100603/...ng_bee_protest

[Smittie61984]

IDK wut his prob is LOL.

[Cass]

That pains me.

[karl_1052]

Ebonics FTL

[Dave]

More wiffle bats and more beatings. Some people just need the stupid beaten out of them

[Papa_Complex]

All well and good if people who spoke English all did so in the same way, but we don't.

[azoomm]

Originally Posted by Papa_Complex

All well and good if people who spoke English all did so in the same way, but we don't.

Not all the words in the spelling bee are English. Fun times.....

[Archren]

Originally Posted by azoomm

Not all the words in the spelling bee are English. Fun times.....

True.. but then large chunks of the modern English language has been borrowed from other languages, notably Latin, German, French, Arabic, etc. Words such as alcohol, tobacco, bronze, magic, paradise, ambassador, dollar, muffin, quartz, maximum, uniform.... I can go on. Some are more obvious than others, some are still considered part of the other language simply because we don't have a word for it (karate or henna, for instance), but it's such common knowledge in our culture, there are several people who do not know the origin of the words, only the meaning.

Sorry, I'm a total geek for this kind of thing.

[Dave]

Originally Posted by Archren

True.. but then large chunks of the modern English language has been borrowed from other languages, notably Latin, German, French, Arabic, etc. Words such as alcohol, tobacco, bronze, magic, paradise, ambassador, dollar, muffin, quartz, maximum, uniform.... I can go on. Some are more obvious than others, some are still considered part of the other language simply because we don't have a word for it (karate or henna, for instance), but it's such common knowledge in our culture, there are several people who do not know the origin of the words, only the meaning.

Sorry, I'm a total geek for this kind of thing.

i always like the ones soldiers added to the lexicon stuff like di di mau, and imshi

[Archren]

Originally Posted by Dave

i always like the ones soldiers added to the lexicon stuff like di di mau, and imshi

Hookah... shishah... I'm sure if the Arabs actually drank liquor, that would have been a staple word by now, too. But shit, don't even get me started on the acronyms becoming common usage in the English language.