"Akeelah and the Bee" was released in mainstream theaters nationwide earlier this year. "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee" is on Broadway and opens in Boston tomorrow. The 2002 documentary, "Spellbound," made waves. And this year's National Spelling Bee was broadcast on primetime network TV. The popularity of spelling bees is soaring - but no one can quite pinpoint why.
Steve Kleinedler, senior editor of the American Heritage Dictionary and host of a spelling bee at the Brattle Theater on Oct. 5, points to the release of "Spellbound" as the start of the craze. "There's certainly been a greater awareness of [spelling bees] in the media in the past couple years," he said. "Why would that be happening now? your guess would honestly be as good as mine."
Junior Sarah Jacknis, who saw both "Spellbound" and "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee," admitted that "[spelling bees] can be very dramatic."
"With 'Spellbound,' you get sucked into the drama and the competition of it all," Jacknis said. "You get into their back stories, so you have [contestants] that you're rooting for."
Kleinedler agreed that competition plays a major part in spelling bees' popularity. "Everyone likes to win," he said. "Competition is very much ingrained in American culture, whether it's football or, for those who can't play football, something like chess or spelling bees.""
Junior Katie Ray, who enjoys spelling bees, said their appeal is hard to explain. "I'm not sure why spelling bees are so interesting," she said. "It's a lot more impressive than you would expect. They're not just difficult words that you or I would know; they're crazy, insane words that don't even sound like they're in English most of the time, and sometimes they aren't."
Professor Ray Jackendoff, who is teaching a linguistics course this semester, credited the difficulty of the English language in making spelling bees so intriguing. "It is a fact about English, as opposed to many other languages, such as Spanish and German and Russian, that the spelling is particularly tricky in its combination of systematic and idiosyncratic factors," he said. "That's why spelling bees are at all interesting. But why suddenly there are all these books and movies about spelling bees, you've got me!"
The recent interest in spelling bees has made them a source of comedy as well as drama. Jacknis described "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee" as "really funny."
"They took people up from the audience and made them part of the show," Jacknis said. "They had them participate and gave them words to spell ... sometimes it would be a ridiculous word that probably doesn't exist, and sometimes it would be 'cow.'"
