OXON HILL, MARYLAND (AP) – As the final pre-competition meeting of the Scripps National Spelling Bee’s word selection panel stretches into its seventh hour, the pronouncers no longer seem to care.

Before panelists can debate the words picked for the bee, they need to hear each word and its language of origin, part of speech, definition and exemplary sentence read aloud. Late in the meeting, lead pronouncer Jacques Bailly and his colleagues – so measured in their pacing and meticulous in their enunciation during the bee – rip through that chore as quickly as possible.

No pauses. No apologies for flubs. By the time of this gathering, two days before the bee, the word list is all but complete.

Each word has been vetted by the panel and slotted into the appropriate round of the nearly century-old annual competition to identify the English language’s best speller.

For decades, the word panel’s work has been a closely guarded secret. This year, Scripps – a Cincinnati-based media company – granted the Associated Press (AP) exclusive access to the panelists and their pre-bee meeting, with the stipulation that the AP would not reveal words unless they were cut from the list.

THEY’RE TOUGH ON WORDS

The 21 panelists sit around a makeshift, rectangular conference table in a windowless room tucked inside the convention centre outside Washington, United States where the bee is staged every year.

They are given printouts including words numbers 770-1,110 – those used in the semifinal rounds and beyond – with instructions that those sheets of paper cannot leave the room.

Hearing the words aloud with the entire panel present – laptops open to Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged dictionary – sometimes illuminates problems. That’s what happened late in Sunday’s meeting. 2009 champion Kavya Shivashankar, an obstetrician/gynaecologist and a recent addition to the panel, chimed in with an objection.

The word gleyde (pronounced “glide”), which means a decrepit old horse and is only used in Britain, has a near-homonym – glyde – with a similar but not identical pronunciation and the same meaning.

Shivashankar said the variant spelling makes the word too confusing, and the rest of the panel quickly agrees to spike gleyde altogether. It won’t be used.

“Nice word, but bye-bye,” pronouncer Kevin Moch said.

For the panelists, the meeting is the culmination of a yearlong process to assemble a word list that will challenge but not embarrass the 230 middle- and elementary-school-aged competitors – and preferably produce a champion within the two-hour broadcast window for Thursday night’s finals.

The panel’s work has changed over the decades. From 1961 to 1984, according to James Maguire’s book American Bee, creating the list was a one-man operation overseen by a Scripps Howard Editorial Promotions Director Jim Wagner, and then by a then-MIT student who approached Wagner about helping with the list in the mid-1970s Harvey Elentuck.

The panel was created in 1985. The current collaborative approach didn’t take shape until the early ’90s. Bailly, the 1980 champion, joined in 1991. “Harvey… made the whole list,” Bailly said. “I never met him. I was just told, ‘You’re the new Harvey.'”

IT’S NOT JUST PICKING WORDS

This year’s meeting includes five full-time bee staffers and 16 contract panelists. The positions are filled via word of mouth within the spelling community or recommendations from panelists. The group includes five former champions: Barrie Trinkle (1973), Bailly, George Thampy (2000), Sameer Mishra (2008) and Shivashankar.

Trinkle, who joined the panel in 1997, used to produce the majority of her submissions by reading periodicals like The New Yorker or The Economist.

“Our raison d’etre was to teach spellers a rich vocabulary that they could use in their daily lives. And as they got smarter and smarter, they got more in contact with each other and were studying off the same lists, it became harder to hold a bee with those same types of

words,” Trinkle said.
Now, more often than not she goes directly to the source – Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged. That’s easier than it used to be.

“The dictionary is on the computer and is highly searchable in all kinds of ways – which the spellers know as well. If they want to find all the words that entered the language in the 1650s, they can do that, which is sometimes what I do,” Trinkle said. “The best words kind of happen to you as you’re scrolling around through the dictionary.”

Not everyone on the panel submits words. Some work to ensure that the definitions, parts of speech and other accompanying information are correct; others are tasked with ensuring that words of similar difficulty are asked at the right times in the competition; others focus on crafting the bee’s new multiple-choice vocabulary questions.

Those who submit words, like Trinkle and Mishra, are given assignments throughout the year to come up with a certain number at a certain level of difficulty.

Mishra pulls his submissions from his own list, which he started when he was a 13-year-old speller. He gravitates toward “the harder end of the spectrum. They are fun and challenging for me and they make me smile, and I know if I was a speller I would be intimidated by that word”, said the 28-year-old Mishra, who just finished his Master of Business Administration at Harvard. “I have no fear about running out (of words), and I feel good about that.”

HOW THE BEE HAS EVOLVED

The panel meets a few times a year, often virtually, to go over words, edit definitions and sentences, and weed out problems.

The process seemed to go smoothly through the 2010s, even amid a proliferation of so-called “minor league” bees, many catering to offspring of highly educated, first-generation Indian immigrants – a group that has come to dominate the competition.

In 2019, a confluence of factors – among them, a wild-card programme that allowed multiple spellers from competitive regions to reach nationals – produced an unusually deep field of spellers. Scripps had to use the toughest words on its list just to cull to a dozen finalists. The bee ended in an eight-way tie, and there was no shortage of critics.

Scripps, however, didn’t fundamentally change the way the word panel operates. It brought in younger panelists more attuned to the ways contemporary spellers study and prepare. And it made format changes designed to identify a sole champion.

The wild-card programme was scrapped, and Scripps added onstage vocabulary questions and a lightning-round tiebreaker.

The panel also began pulling words avoided in the past. Place names, trademarks, words with no language of origin: As long as a word isn’t archaic or obsolete, it’s fair game.

“They’ve started to understand they have to push further into the dictionary,” said a 20-year-old former speller and a co-founder with his older sister Shobha of SpellPundit Shourav Dasari, which sells study guides and hosts a popular online bee. “Last year, we started seeing stuff like tribal names that are some of the hardest words in the dictionary.”

THERE’S A METICULOUSNESS TO IT ALL

Members of the panel insist they worry little about other bees or the proliferation of study materials and private coaches.

But those coaches and entrepreneurs spend a lot of time thinking about the words Scripps is likely to use – often quite successfully.

Dasari said there are roughly 100,000 words in the dictionary that are appropriate for spelling bees. He pledges that 99 per cent of the words on Scripps’ list are included in SpellPundit’s materials.

Anyone who learns all those words is all but guaranteed to win, Dasari said – but no one has shown they can do it.

“I just don’t know when anybody would be able to completely master the unabridged dictionary,” Dasari said. Since the bee resumed after its 2020 pandemic cancellation, the panel has been scrutinised largely for the vocabulary questions, which have added a capricious element, knocking out some of the most gifted spellers even if they don’t misspell a word.

Last year’s champion Harini Logan, was briefly ousted on a vocabulary word, “pullulation” – only to be reinstated minutes later after arguing that her answer could be construed as correct.

“That gave us a sense of how very, very careful we need to be in terms of crafting these questions,” said the language columnist for The Wall Street Journal and a chief contributor of words for the vocabulary rounds Ben Zimmer.

Zimmer is also sensitive to the criticism that some vocabulary questions are evaluating the spellers’ cultural sophistication rather than their mastery of roots and language patterns.

This year’s vocabulary questions contain more clues that will guide gifted spellers to the answers, he said.

There will always be complaints about the word list, but making the competition as fair as possible is the panel’s chief goal.

Missing hyphens or incorrect capitalisation, ambiguities about singular and plural nouns or transitive and intransitive verbs – no question is too insignificant.

“This is really problematic,” Trinkle said, pointing out a word that has a homonym with a similar definition.

Scripps Editorial Manager Maggie Lorenz agrees: “We’re going to bump that word entirely.”

Lina Bonos

THE WASHINGTON POST – On a typical workday, Haomiao Huang spends most of his time on Zoom calls, perusing spreadsheets and pitch decks, and trying to make smart decisions about which robotics and hardware start-ups to fund and which to skip.

He has also spent months, together with his wife, practicing an ancient woodworking technique where two pieces of wood are meant to interlock seamlessly. After each failed attempt, these amateur woodworkers toss another expensive piece of white oak into their scrap pile.

“We’re patient,” said Lydia The after carefully running a piece of wood through a table saw.

“We’re making the dining table we’re going to die with.”

Huang and The who works in the pharmaceutical industry – could easily walk into an upscale furniture store near the wood shop where they’re toiling on a Saturday, and spend USD4,000 on a table that’s already constructed.

But like many modern workers who are tethered to digital devices all day, Huang and The are hooked on the stress relief – and the sense of connection and accomplishment – that comes from working with their hands.

“It’s tremendously grounding, and it’s meditative,” Huang said of the time he spends in the wood shop. By day, Huang is a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins, a powerful Silicon Valley firm that invested early in such tech giants as Amazon, Google, Twitter and Uber.

“When you have a power saw… you can’t think about the financing that isn’t coming together… If I don’t hold it in a particular way, I’m going to lose my hand.”

In tech’s boom times, many sought to “move fast and break things”, a motto Mark Zuckerberg popularised at Facebook and blossomed into a growth-at-all-costs ethos that spread throughout Silicon Valley. Now, in an era of layoffs and cost-cutting, workers feel an urge to slow down and make things.

Woodworking shops have sprung up around the city in recent years, catering to those wanting to work with their hands. Start-ups schedule classes to team-build, and workers for two tech giants say there are places to woodwork on campus (the companies didn’t confirm or deny).

“Tech workers never believe me when I tell them to do it the slower way. They do it the faster way and mess it up,” said a part-time software engineer Jake Klingensmith who runs the wood shop at Clayroom, a large space in the Soma neighbourhood with a ceramics studio in the front.

The interest in cultivating handiwork skills goes beyond wood. The maker movement, where people use do-it-yourself techniques to construct things, has been flourishing in the Bay Area for about a decade. In the pandemic, some tech workers rekindled their Lego obsessions. Glass-blowing, welding, pottery-making and other art forms have also taken off.

Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg recently posted on Facebook about how he learned to sew while helping his daughters construct dresses out of 3D-printed material.

Venture capitalist Arielle Zuckerberg, one of Mark’s younger sisters, and several others recently convened 40 friends at a Lake Tahoe compound for Learning Man. The weekend, complete with custom swag, was a studious play on Burning Man; attendees taught one another how to sew, DJ, whip up the perfect French omelet and more.

“Even tech workers are not just passionate about tech,” said Zuckerberg, who shared her DJ skills with attendees. When Zuckerberg learned how to sew a Learning Man patch onto her Patagonia vest, she “had this deep sense of accomplishment, and it was so incredibly satisfying.” She enjoyed it so much, she bought a sewing machine. That’s also a big part of the attraction of woodworking, said Neil Gershgorn who owns Clayroom. A software engineer, for example, can publish code and then debug it as long as necessary. Whereas, Gershgorn noted that “if you make a mistake with your chisel..it’s completely done”.

However, these hobbies are not cheap – woodworking classes cost hundreds of dollars, a studio membership plus materials quickly balloons into the thousands, further catering to the elite nature of tech world, where engineers draw salaries in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Compared with other pandemic hobbies like bread-baking and racket sports, “woodworking has a slightly higher barrier of entry in terms of tools and access”, Klingensmith said. Huang and The estimate that they’ve spent about USD10,000 on woodworking classes, their studio membership and materials. Working slowly and deliberately can be difficult for people who are trained to focus on speed and efficiency.

A retired software engineer Sharmila Lassen said during a recent class at Clayroom that the experience is as much a lesson in patience as it is in woodworking. When she tried to “optimise” – tech jargon for making a process as efficient as possible – by stacking two pieces of wood on top of one another, she then had to even out her imprecise cuts. Overall, she’ll spend USD300 and 12 hours to construct a small serving tray.

Lassen’s friend a Senior Vice President at an architecture and engineering firm Jake Klingensmith joined her for the serving-tray class. “I came in here with a headache,” Jones said, but working in the wood shop calms her. “I like learning how to be competent at something,” she added. “At the end of it – look, I have this thing,” she said, holding up her tray, “instead of a spreadsheet.”

“When you’re doing woodworking, you’re tapping into a history of human craftsmanship that’s been around for the entire existence of our species,” Klingensmith noted.

Enthusiasts find the hobby to be a good match for a downturn, when many are out of work or are deliberately taking time off.

John Szot who moved from Manhattan to the Bay Area recently, finds woodworking to be a “nice change of pace” while he takes a break from working in finance. He finds opportunities to work with his hands are “increasingly rare”. Szot also came to the wood shop in part to meet people, as he’s new to the area.

While about half of the country’s white-collar workers have returned to the office, tech giants are among the few remaining holdouts, and office vacancies in downtown San Francisco are at an all-time high – so high some offices are being converted to apartments.

As people spend less time commuting, they have more time for hobbies, and more of a need for connection, Gershgorn said. There is “this kinetic energy that happens when you come into the studio post-5 o’clock”, Gershgorn added, when miter saws are whirring and lathes are turning as people work on disparate projects side-by-side.

The owner of Wood Thumb Chris Steinrueck another wood shop in the neighbourhood, finds the hobby to have a certain rejuvenating power for desk workers who spend most of their day staring at electronic devices.

Wood Thumb frequently has groups from nearby tech companies coming by for one-time classes that double as team-building exercises. When people come in for a class, “you can just tell they’re zonked”, Steinrueck said, likening their demeanor to that of a “robot zombie”. By the end of a class where participants have made cutting boards or a small triangle shelf, he noticed that “everybody is just pumped and excited – and there’s life in the room”.

Huang and The got into the wood shop in part because they were looking for a new way to connect. The hobby is “a great bonding experience for us”, Huang said.

The couple has a rule where, if one person gets burned out finishing something, the other takes the project over the finish line.

When The needs a new piece of wood with notches to anchor a nightstand on the wall, Huang jumps in to construct it.

And when Huang feels defeated from trying to master the difficult angles of a bridle joint for the dining table they are making, The swoops in.

Instead of hacking into a piece of wood that could have been a table leg, they are going back to the basics and building a prototype. Making a model with scrap wood is advice Klingensmith gave them that has taken a while to sink in.

“I’m very close,” The told Huang, proudly holding up a mortise and tenon after running the wood through a table saw.

Huang suggested using the power sander to round out the edges til they fit together smoothly.

“Then I’ll end up going too fast,” she reasoned. “It’s so close. Just a little more patience”.