Officials at the 2013 Scripps National Spelling Bee have announced that 42 of this year's original 281 contestants have successfully moved on to the semifinals, which will take place Thursday, May 30 in the mid-afternoon. Following the semifinals, the championship finals will be broadcast across the nation and the world Thursday evening.
The semifinals will be broadcast live on Thursday from 2:00-5:00 p.m. on ESPN2. Immediately after the semifinal round, Scripps will post a list of participants moving on to the championship finals on its official Web site. According to the official site, Scripps says it anticipates "that no more than 12 spellers will advance to the championship finals."
The championship final round is slated to be broadcast live on ESPN from 8:00-10:00 p.m. on Thursday evening.
While it's now official that 42 kids will be vying for that championship spot tonight, organizers had originally designated 41 contestants moving forward to the semifinals. However, they eventually decided that Nikitha Chandran of FL, whose spelling of the word "viruscide" was an acceptable alternative to their official spelling of the word - "virucide" and they advanced her to the semifinals as well, bringing the number to an even 42.
Of these 42 contestants, here is a state-by-state breakdown of who will go on to compete Thursday: Illinois (four contestants); Florida, Indian, New York, Texas (three contestants each); California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Ohio (two contestants each); Arizona, Gerogia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Vermont, Washington state (one contestant each); one contestant from China; and lastly one contestant hailing from Italy.
This isn't the first time many of 2013's contestants have competed at Scripps; 63 of this year's challengers also participated the event last year, and seven participants have competed in the bee at least four times or more, including 13-year-old Arvind Mahankali, who finished in third place for the past two years.
TribToday has reported that there were a number of noteworthy occurrences that took place during the competition on Wednesday. For example, the only blind contestant, 12-year-old Richelle Zampella from Oklahoma, spelled "capricious" and trianon" correctly on-stage and took the computer test in braille, earning scores high enough to advance to the semifinals. Then there was 13-year-old Katie Denis of North Carolina, who asked judges, "would you mind if I were to sing the letters [to the word]? It would help me." The judges agreed and Denis correctly belted out the letters to the word "stabilimeter."
The kids in this year's competition have been spelling out a host of different words, ranging from common to nearly unheard of. According to the Scripps official Twitter feed, some of the words contestants spelled correctly in Round 3, pushing them into the semifinals include fuguist; equilibrium; andouille; truttaceous; hibernaculum; epaxial; wafflestomper; and clairaudient. Giving them due credit, contestants in this year's bee have put in hours and hours of preparation as they studied what may arguably have been in some cases thousands of words.
But what about the rest of the current generation of kids who have come to rely on computer spell-check programs for school assignments and have created their own lingo when it comes to texting and social media, using newfangled terms like LOL, OMG, STFU, luv (love), ur (your), y (why), and so on and so forth?
The New York Daily News reports that during the lunch break Wednesday at the Scripps Bee, a Washington reporter named Susan Milligan asked the official pronouncer of the program Jacques Bailly what kind of impact today's technological innovations will have on the spelling and grammar skills of young people.
"It's the same phenomenon as what happened in the 19th century with the telegraph," Bailly said. "People had to write short because every letter cost. And that didn't ruin the language...you had a different language and it didn't cause standard English to deteriorate or fall apart."
"There will always be a correct standard version of the language and people will know they have to learn it, whether applying for a job or government contract, he continued. "They will seek that [the correct version] out and do it."
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