“What if…” is never a happy question, and seeing defeat snatched from the jaws of victory isn’t fun, especially here in Chicago where we’ve been witness to that scenario a few too many times over the years with our sports teams.
I can only wonder how long it will take Julianna Canabal-Rodriquez to get over the sting of being unfairly bounced from the finals of the recently concluded 2010 Scripps National Spelling Bee. Unlike Armando Gallaraga, the Tigers pitcher who received an apology from umpire Jim Joyce, who denied him a perfect game with a badly blown call—Julianna, to my knowledge, hasn’t heard a word from Jacques Bailly, the official of the Scripps Spelling Bee whose careless pronunciation caused her to misspell her word in that fateful 6th round last Friday.
Julianna’s word was “gyokuro,” (correctly pronounced “gyOH-ku-roh”) which we were told was a type of high-grade Japanese tea. Bailly, the “official pronouncer” for the annual spelling bee, mispronounced the word on his first read-through as “gyAH-ku-roh.” He mispronounced it again on his second try. Then, when asked by Juliana to repeat it, he mispronounced it several more times, never getting it right during the two-and-a-half minutes she stood at the microphone before eventually misspelling the word and stepping away.
Watching Julianna you could tell she was grappling with what came down to two choices in her mind: going with “g-y-a” or “g-y-o” to start the word. By her repeated requests for Bailly to repeat “gyokuro,” it was obvious to me that she was leaning toward the correct spelling but that the way he was pronouncing the first syllable was pushing her toward a spelling she had no confidence in. In the end, she went against her gut entirely because of his pronunciation. She was eliminated from the tournament as a result.
As she was walking off the stage in stunned disappointment, the commentators were remarking about how Bailly had seemingly led her down the wrong path, having Anglicized the word when he pronounced it “gyAH-ku-roh.” They were right. No one speaking correct Japanese would have said it that way. Even I, for whom Japanese was a first language when I was growing up, would have ended up spelling it incorrectly after being given that erroneous hint.
For a contest predicated entirely on absolute precision, the E. W. Scripps Company ought to be as demanding of perfection on the part of its officials as it is the young men and women who courageously compete each year in its famous spelling bee.
