Media Alert

The 89th Scripps National Spelling Bee is airing on ESPN-2 right now, until 2 PM EST.  The finals will be broadcast tonight (Thursday) at 8 PM EST.

One thing I've noticed is how "frisky" the judges have gotten when a contestant asks, "Could you use it in a sentence, please?"  One of the words was "tibourbou" and the sentence the judge used was, "When a tibourbou falls in the forest, no one hears it, unless the NSA is listening -- and the NSA is always listening."

(For those curious, tibourbou is a tree native to Brazil and Costa Rica, and is an alternative fiber crop to make paper.)

Another word was "salele," (sah-lay-lee) and when asked for a sentence, the contestant got back, "Jake told Caroline all about the salele he caught on his fishing trip to Oahu -- and Caroline told Jake that he needed to get more interesting stories."  

(It's a small dusky silver or silvery bronze percoid fish from tropical Indo-Pacific area, when you next bring it up.)

Then there was "tyee."  Another fish, as it turns out -- a large kind of salmon.  The sentence given was, "There were times when the tyee thought this whole 'swimming upstream' thing didn't make much sense."

By the way, as I was typing this, one of the words presented was "colporteur."  My eyes were focused on the computer, so I only heard it spoken, and didn't see the word spelled on the screen.  My immediate thought was..."Cole Porter???  Cool, I got one. But...really??"  Obviously, no.  Oddly, the definition is sort of literary, as well.  It's a peddler of books, newspapers, and similar literature.  (The secondary description is "someone employed by a religious society to distribute Bibles and other religious tracts.").

Yes, Cole Porter would have been an unlikely word.  But this is the National Spelling Bee, so Anything Goes...