Why spelling bee

Of course there was no such thing as proper spelling in English before the early 17th century, when the first English dictionaries emerged. But the language had adopted words from a wide variety of sources, and they could not be coerced into following one set of rules.

In class-conscious Britain, the focus was on correct pronunciation. In the United States, correct spelling was the thing. The American obsession may have started with the Puritans, who emphasized the power of precisely written biblical phrases. By the midth century, spelling competitions were common; Benjamin Franklin recommended their use in a proposal for a school. Recreational spelling challenges were fashionable in the 19th century for both adults and children.

A popular poem of the era imagined a spelling bee between California gold miners that ended in a fight to the death. If anything, the national spelling competition, held annually since except during World War II , is more popular than ever, with the final rounds televised on ESPN and the whole ordeal captured in aw-shucks documentaries. Shops are closed, bars are packed with avid spelling bee fans watching the competition, and if you haven't already spotted someone wearing a jersey with the name and number of their favorite speller, you just haven't been looking hard enough.

We've been involved with the Bee since , but the truth is that even then spelling bees were considered old-fashioned.

In fact, many of our earliest examples of the phrase spelling bee in print modify it with the term "old-fashioned," which means that by the time we started to call them spelling bees, around the turn of the 20th century, people had already started to think of them as a quaint holdover from an earlier time. Here are some of the things people called spelling bees before the name spelling bee became common:. Perhaps it's good that we settled on bee. It's buzzy, it's simple; it's easy to spell.

Best of luck to all of this year's spellers. The imagery of the social and industrious nature of bees was sufficient to change 'beens' into 'bees'. Many of the activities where people congregated to undertake communal work became known as bees of one sort or another - 'husking-bees', 'quilting-bees', 'barn-raising-bees'.

A less pleasant form of assembly was the hanging or lynching bee. The paper reported a story of an incident in Maysville, Indiana, in which a case of mistaken identity almost resulted in a lynching:. The best-known 'bee', and the one that remains in common use, is the 'spelling bee'.

A Dictionary of American English. Sir William A. Craigie and James R. Hulbert, eds. University of Chicago Press, Mencken, H.