Hawai'i speller out in Round 2
By Derrick DePledge
Advertiser Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON — Nathaniel Salazar was cool and confident during the first round of the national spelling bee yesterday, but he stumbled in the written test in the second round.
Gannett News Service
By the end of the first round, the Maui eighth-grader was one of 175 spellers who had survived.
Nathaniel Salazar, Hawai'i's contestant in the national spelling bee, breezed through the first round in Washington yesterday but was eliminated during Round 2's written test.
But he missed 12 words on a 25-word written test in the second round and was out of the competition by evening.
"I don't know what happened," he said of the written test.
Earlier, when the judge asked Salazar to spell "cordillera," which means a mountain range, he took his time. He wanted the word's origin. He wanted a definition. He asked the judge to use it in a sentence.
"Cordillera? C-o-r-d-i-l-l-e-r-a," Salazar said, smiling as he bounced back to his seat on the stage.
The 76th Annual Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee opened with 251 spellers from across the United States, the territories and as far away as Europe and Jamaica.
The bee, held in a ballroom of the Grand Hyatt hotel a few blocks from the White House, is an educational competition that evolved over the years into a widely celebrated event. Young spellers who survive local or regional bees advance here to test their skills against the very best.
ESPN, the cable sports channel, will televise today's final rounds live for those who like to watch smart kids squirm. The contestants understand there is no real future in spelling, with no professional bees, and they know that most of the words they memorize will likely never be used in actual conversation. Still, for middle-school bragging rights, it's all pretty neat.
Salazar, who attends Maui Waena Intermediate School in Kahului, said he studied for two to five hours a day to prepare for the Hawai'i state bee in March and the national finals. He eventually wants to go into computer science, but for now his interests are movies, basketball and computer games.
His parents, Manuel and Wilma, were in the ballroom, which was packed yesterday with family members, dedicated bee functionaries, and newspaper and television reporters. "When you look at it from out in the audience and hear the words, it seems hard. But when I'm up there I'm just calm," Salazar, 13, said between rounds.
Words in the first round were drawn from the official study booklet and the sponsor guides used at local bees, so the spellers have an idea what to expect. "I knew most of the words," Salazar said.
Others tripped up. No amount of warning can prepare a teenager for "borborygmus" or "erythropsia."
Words in the later rounds are taken from Webster's Third New International Dictionary and get progressively tougher until only one speller is left standing. That speller will receive a $12,000 cash prize and other goodies that include — naturally — a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
