From the Idaho Panhandle

Pigs Fly in Sandpoint Bee

By Cate Huisman, 2-13-10

	Swine Fluezies and friends with spelling bee trophy

Last week’s adult spelling bee in Sandpoint served the primary purpose of raising funds to put the Bonner County Daily Bee—our local newspaper—in school classrooms. But it also gave area wordsmiths an opportunity to strut their stuff.

This is not to say that the ability to spell obscure words has anything to do with creative verbal ability. There are lots of good writers who can’t spell—this is why God made spellcheckers and copyeditors. But is it perhaps not entirely coincidental that a team of writers representing Keokee Creative Group won the bee for the second year in a row.

As teams are judged not only on their spelling but also on their outfits, this year the Keokee group came dressed as the Swine Flu. Some referred to the team—made up primarily of women of a certain age—as the Swine Fluezies. They wore construction-paper chimneys, pig noses held over their other noses by elastic bands, and attractive pink sweat suits with curly tails attached in an appropriate place. As the competition heated up, however, the Fluezies found it necessary to remove their flues and (extra) noses to compete effectively. (One team member even found that the preponderance of costume items on her head caused her eyeglasses to fog up.)

This knocked the Fluezies out of the costume competition portion of the bee, as other teams were able to remain fully dressed. They included, among others, scholars (in academic robes), judges (in robes and wigs), and angels (in robes and wings). This last group, representing the Panhandle Alliance for Education, was accompanied by its own cheering section dressed as bees. These three endearing individuals sang an amazing assortment of angel-themed songs as their team spelled, then switched allegiances wildly after the angels were eliminated, coming up with appropriate songs for the remaining teams of Beatles (okay, so that wasn’t so hard), Sheriff’s deputies (somewhat more challenging), and Fluezies (truly impressive porcine musical stylings).

The highlight of the spelling part of the competition came when the Fluezies spelled onomatopoeia correctly—this being one of several useless things that one team member inexplicably remembered from tenth-grade English. But the word they won on was camouflage, which they spelled correctly after a team from the East Bonner County Library (the Beatles) faltered on cappuccino, with its tricky double consonants.

Truth be told, however, the Keokee group actually misspelled triskaidekaphobia (they left out the second i) near the end of the competition. Thus eliminated, they were enjoying the prospect of going home and going to bed when an amorous admirer of one team member found $50 in his pocket and used it to buy the team’s way back into the competition. This isn’t as bad as it sounds—the master of ceremonies, Bee publisher David Keyes, had made it clear that such bribery was an appropriate option. It enabled the bee to raise more money, and, with Keyes’s enthusiastic encouragement, several teams had taken advantage of it. By the later rounds of the competition, however, the price, which started at $20, had increased significantly, and the Fluezies could have saved their savior some money if they’d missed an easier word earlier instead.

Keokee publisher Chris Bessler was thrilled to think that the spectacular four-foot-high gold (colored) trophy would stand in the small foyer of his office for another year, and the Fluezies all hung their pig noses around it to commemorate the occasion. Still, one has to wonder what the outcome would have been had the library folks not felt that it would be wrong to spend public funds (since they represented a public library) to buy their way back in after the debacle with cappuccino. They retired with their reputations unblemished, heads held high, perhaps thinking they ought to spend a little more time at Starbuck’s.

Triskaidekaphobia, by the way, means a fear of the number thirteen. Onomatopoeia refers to words that make a sound, such as oink. Everybody knows what a cappuccino is, of course, but not many people know how to spell it.

Writer Cate Huisman admits with a mixture of pride and chagrin that she was a Swine Fluezie.

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