Ambassador gets a lesson during quiz
By Katie Daubs
Canwest News Service
WASHINGTON — When the Canadian ambassador quizzed the country’s top spellers Tuesday, it only took one word to discover he was a bit of a rookie.
He started by asking 10-year-old Veronica Penny, Canada’s youngest competitor, to spell “conchology.”
Veronica, who hails from Hamilton, rocked back and forth on her heels.
“Can I by any chance have the definition?” she asked.
“It’s the study of shells,” Michael Wilson replied.
Veronica started to think — and that’s when Wilson made the tragic mistake of opening it up to the floor.
“Who wants to spell it?” he asked.
“I’m spelling it!” Veronica piped up.
And she did. (She knows her shells. She also knows her ‘ologys’.)
After Calgary’s Cody Wang took care of “tessitura,” and Kamloops’ Curtis Bogetti provided the definition (“It has to do with singing”), Wilson told the spellers he was impressed the 22 Canadians, regional winners in the Canwest Canspell National Spelling Bee, beat out 225,000 spellers at school and regional bees to make it to Washington.
“When I look around the room at you young people, I see the future of Canada,” he said. “I see a very bright future and I’m just tickled pink and proud to have you here.”
He thanked the parents and gave the spellers the difficult task of clearing the room of cookies by the end of the afternoon.
Spencer Warriner, like all of the spellers, was looking pretty spiffy in embassy-appropriate clothes. The Alameda, Sask., speller said that’s why he was drawn to the cheese table. Wang, also near the cheese, skilfully extracted some cheddar out of a particularly elegant Jenga tower.
“You’re going to topple it Cody!” said Victoria Lan, of Victoria.
Luckily, lots of younger brothers and sisters were on hand to fulfil the ambassador’s request.
Earlier, when the spellers first walked into the room, they were shocked at the spread.
“Is this all for us?” asked Tegan Odland, of Enchant, Alta.
Before they left the embassy, Canada’s senior spellers — Anqi Dong, Bogetti, Wang and Jonathan Schut — gave Wilson a dictionary so he’ll be ready for next year.
Before the visit to the Canadian embassy, the spellers had lunch at the Scripps Great American Barbeque, where they met some of their counterparts from around the world.
Today, the spellers will complete their oral tests. They will each be given a word, and if they spell it correctly, they will add three points to their score from the written qualifier to determine who makes the stage for Friday’s semifinal rounds.
A perfect score is 28.
The championship will be broadcast live at 8 p.m. ET Friday on ABC-TV.
— Ottawa Citizen
