SPELLING BEE

Every year for decades on the last day of school before Thanksgiving, I would surprise my students with a "pop quiz" of sorts. I would tell them that they seemed symptomatic of "senioritis" far earlier than anticipated, and that I was getting a little tired of their "uppity" attitude. Here was a quiz that would bring them back to earth. Some moaned when they heard it was a spelling test, but others, having won spelling bees throughout their childhoods, awaited the quiz with unrestrained glee. I gave them about ten minutes to spell twenty words--words I pronounced and defined for them.

After they had answered completely, I then asked them to write on top of the paper the number of words they believe they had answered correctly. I had them switch papers with each other and proceeded through the list, spelling each word correctly. I reminded the students who were grading the work of their peers that even a single letter wrong warranted an X next to the answer. Here is the List:

While reading the words to them initially, I'd have to explain to some that "vermilion" was a color or "obbligato" was a musical term, but they recognized most of the words even if they were not words often employed as part of their working vocabularies. While providing the answers, I had a good deal of fun at their expense. For many students, the first correct answer didn't come until "moccasin" at Number 8. Mostly I heard groans, or defiance if I said that "rarefy" ended in "efy" and not the "ify" ending that virtually all of them had written. The wailing grew louder when I insisted that "liquefy" was also one of six common words in the English language that concluded with an "efy" combination! (I've tried to figure the others: defy, beefy, putrefy, stupefy I think). When I got to Number 13, I told them that "sacrilegious" is not "religious" with "sac" in front of it! We fought over "impostor", which is now so widely spelled with an "er" ending that I believe that battle is lost.

Here are the answers:

I had gotten the quiz from an Esquire article back in the 60s or so. The author was T.K. Brown III, who explained that this quiz, given to 800 college graduates, originally contained sixty questions, and that these had been the twenty words that more people got wrong than any others from that list. Many of the original test takers were teachers, journalists, advertising professionals, or editors, and they had been quite successful with many words that confused the average person--words like "embarrass" or "weird" or "separate". But they were often stumped by the twenty words on this list. The median score for the professionals was six correct. Only ten percent even got as many as twelve right.

I told my students that there would be a prize for the winner, and counted down from twenty to see who had the highest score. In most years, there was no winner until we were down in the single digits--usually seven or eight correct. I think fourteen was achieved by a few students over fifty years. I don't recall anyone higher than that. Most students had about three correct.

But I also honored the student with the greatest discrepancy between the number correct and the projected number that the student had marked on top of his or her paper. The winner was given the "Hubris" Award, and I reminded him or her of that distinction right through to graduation!

I also gave my students a short "World's Hardest Quotes Quiz". They performed terribly on it, but there was a sharp difference in the performance of students on this quiz in the 1980s and 1990s compared to that of students in the 2010s and 2020s. Forty years ago, almost all students recognized the quotes. Many were able to guess what was commonly thought to be the correct answer, even if it was actually wrong. Students in this century, however, often didn't even recognize the quotes as part of common parlance and therefore had no clue as to what the missing word or phrase might be. I'm not sure what that told me, but it was clear evidence that there really isn't a collective group of idiomatic expressions shared by the common people any longer. Everything is niche today. Here is the quiz:

You know it's an old quiz when you see it done with a typewriter! Yes, there were double Hubris winners! The average score by my students was zero. I only got three correct. Here are the answers:

I gave my students copies of the quizzes to take home, so that they could challenge their families while fighting for the turkey leg.