Spelling bee in the bonnet

Anatoly Liberman, the Oxford etymologist, takes off on spelling after reading of the winner of the latest Spelling Bee contest. Spelling gymnastics be damned; he confides “I have been dealing with students most of my life. Among the hundreds of the young people I see at my lectures, I rarely find anyone who is aware of what happened to Tom Sawyer, David Copperfield, and Natasha Rostova, or who recognizes the word Decameron, let alone the names Walter Scott and Washington Irving.”* I suspect also that he rarely finds any student who can correctly spell bromocriptine, Philepitta, Metohija, hwyl, or Bhubaneswar, all of which this year’s winning worker bee blew through. I would agree that Professor Liberman’s desiderata are more important than spelling chops, though of course for all we know the Shrey Parikh may know all about all of the things the professor lists. His spelling prowess is not in doubt: The New York Times calculates that the champion “spelled more than one word every three…