centaur: In Greek mythology, the Centaurs are a race of creatures composed of part human and part horse. … [They are typically] depicted as the torso of a human joined at the (human’s) waist to the horse’s withers, where the horse’s neck would be. (from Wikipedia)
I’ve written here before about the annual Atlanta Orthographic Meet (aka spelling bee), and 2008’s event was held last night at Manuel’s as always. I won’t repeat what I said in last year’s post, so go back and take a look if you’re unfamiliar with this.
Here are some examples of words from this year:
Round 1: “badminton”, “cartilage”, “scabbard”, “nary” Round 2: “debouch”, “anodyne”, “offal”, “marcessant” Round 3: “caducous”, “leishmaniasis”, “solfeggi” Round 4: “molechcha”, “serien”, “churriguresce”
I usually get through Round 1 with only 1 or 2 errors, advance to Round 2 wounded but alive, and then get finished off there. And usually one of those Round 1 errors is just plain stupid, so I try to go back and rethink each word from scratch. For some reason my brain was completely drawing a blank on “centaur” in Round 1 — I mean, I know exactly what a centaur is and I know exactly how to spell it, but as the word was announced, all I could think was “what? scentor? sentor?” It just didn’t click, even with the definition being read out — it’s the strangest thing. And so that was one of my two errors in that round (the other was “reminisce”, for which I make no excuses, I simply spelled it wrong) and it turned out that so many people got zero errors or only one error, that two errors in Round 1 wasn’t good enough to advance. Ah well. Now I get to obsess about the word “centaur” for the rest of my life.
See you in 2009!
Update 21-Jan-2009: this year’s meet is scheduled for Saturday, February 21st, so mark your calendars! They now have a proper website at www.atlantaopenorthographicmeet.org — don’t miss the menu of pages on the right side of the screen (you might need to scroll there). By linking to their site here, I’m hoping that Google will get a whiff of it and make it pop up when people search for “Atlanta spelling bee” or “Atlanta orthographic meet”, ’cause right now you get their oooold sites …