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While it may be exaggeration to call spelling bees "hot," they are zipping into the pop-culture zeitgeist.
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee plays on Broadway. Akeelah and the Bee is in movie theaters. The final rounds of the Scripps National Spelling Bee air in prime time June 1 on ABC.
And American Bee, James Maguire's exhaustive, and occasionally exhausting, examination of the National Bee has landed in bookstores.
Maguire gives readers the ABCs of the competition that began in 1925, and he doesn't stop until he works his way through X, Y and Z.
Each year, more than 250 kids who have out-spelled millions of others in school, local and regional competitions line up before the microphone.
Most of these students, who must not have passed beyond the eighth grade, spend hundreds of hours memorizing words, researching derivations and mastering linguistic patterns.
The Paideia, a book containing 3,800 words, is distributed by bee organizers several months prior to the event. Top spellers also work their way through the 23,000-word Consolidated Word List.
Even those lists don't contain the most difficult words they may face. David Tidmarsh studied all 475,000 entries in the Merriam-Webster unabridged dictionary.
The 2004 showdown between Tidmarsh and Akshay Buddiga, who were confronted with killers such as scheherazadian and autochthonous, was a thriller.
But any drama found in American Bee quickly dissipates. Maguire's unabashed affection for the bee and its meritocracy of spellers sustained him through countless rounds of competition.
It also blinded him to the fact that so many of those matches didn't have to be recounted -- seemingly word for word, speller by speller.
Maguire's good humor emerges during a crash course in the history of the English language from the fifth century, when Germanic tribes invaded what's now known as England, to publication of the 2005 Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Included are smart takes on the contributions of the English bon vivant Samuel Johnson and the puritanical American Noah Webster.
The history of bees (they were popular social events in the early 1800s) gets the same entertaining treatment.
Lamentably, his devotion to the spelling bee and its participants weighs down much more of his book.
American Bee: The National Spelling Bee and the Culture of Word Nerds
By James Maguire
Rodale, 363 pp., $24.95
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