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S-e-s-q-u-i-p-e-d-a-l-o-p-h-i-l-i-a
December 18, 2003, 10:07 p.m. So I saw Spellbound today, this great little documentary about the American National Spelling Bee in 1999 and eight kids entered in it. It was fantastic fun, especially for this little spelling nazi : ) But I wasn’t the only one who got into – throughout the theatre you could hear people muttering the spellings of the contestants’ words, pitting their wits against those of the competing teenagers. I was most pleased when I knew how to spell some of the words that kids got knocked out on, such as ‘banns’, ‘palimpsest’ and ‘hellebore’. I was surprised that more of the kids didn’t ask for the etymology of the words. That would tell me more about how a word was spelled than its meaning . . . English has borrowed from so many other languages – it basically started off as a pidgin language – that you have to know a word’s origins to know how to spell it; you have to know how that language makes its sounds as opposed to others. I wonder if they would have accepted British spelling . . . I suppose not on words like ‘realise’, but what about ‘paediatrics’, which is a technical term? Anyway, I’m sure that’s not really interesting to you. Just go see it. It’s good stuff, I swear. Oh, my sister got her raw HSC results today - above 90 in everything. We're hoping for a scale up, so that her UAI (universities admissions index) will be enough to get her into the course she wants, which is about a 95. That comes out tomorrow, but we have to wait until January, when the unis publish their cut-off UAIs.
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