Spelling Bees R Obsolete

Why show off a skill rendered useless by machines?: Alexandra Petri
By Matt Cantor,  Newser Staff
Posted Jun 2, 2011 4:33 PM CDT
Scripps National Spelling Bee Is Obsolete: Alexandra Petri
A speller does her thing at the annual bee.   (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

It’s time again for the Scripps National Spelling Bee—but these days, it’s more “hilarious” than educational, writes Alexandra Petri in the Washington Post. “What better way to announce to the world at large that you have a totally useless and unmarketable skill—besides, I guess, framing your sociology degree?” Champion spellers should “savor it now,” she adds, because their "services will never be required again" in this age of Microsoft Word and iPhones.

Indeed, being a great speller is kind of like having perfect pitch, she argues. "It does you no particular good, and it makes your life less comfortable than it would be otherwise." Most people get by "just fine not wincing when someone’s put an E where an A ought to be. But you are in acute physical pain,” Petri writes. Still, “on the bright side, spellers," if our spell-checking "gadgets ever stop werking, we’re all scrued.” (More Scripps National Spelling Bee stories.)

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