Read this dispatch from Chidanand Rajghatta, who writes for the Times of India from the United States. He has an uncanny gift for turning phrases, and irreverence,but this one takes the cake.
It is about how some words spelt out by Arvind Mahankali who won this year's US Spelling Bee were acceptable to to the judges but not others.
The thing to note is the use of words, apparently or Yiddish origin which is used by Americans but are unfamiliar to Indian readers. They have been marked bold by this blogger.
"Bee-winning spelling not kosher
Chidanand Rajghatta
It is about how some words spelt out by Arvind Mahankali who won this year's US Spelling Bee were acceptable to to the judges but not others.
The thing to note is the use of words, apparently or Yiddish origin which is used by Americans but are unfamiliar to Indian readers. They have been marked bold by this blogger.
"Bee-winning spelling not kosher
Chidanand Rajghatta
Washington:
You just can’t take their word for it.
The buzz is that the US National Spelling Bee and its 2013 titlist Arvind Mahankali might not have been right on the matzo ball when it came to the winning word on Thursday. That’s the kvetch from Yiddish mavens cited in the New York Times, produced from the home of the largest Jewish diaspora in the world (New York City has more Jews than Jerusalem.)
Mahankali spelled out kn-a-i-d-e-l, a German word of Yiddish origin — which is a dough or dumpling that Jewish cooks put in chicken soup — to win the $30,000 prize ahead of 281 finalists. The Spelling Bee judges accepted the way he spelled it because that’s the way it’s laid out in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, bible for all worker bees and drones.
Merriam-Webster officials defended their choice of spelling as the most common variant of the word from a language that is about as alive as Sanskrit in India, and is written in the Hebrew, not Roman, alphabet.
But linguists at the Yiddish Scientific Institution YIVO say that’s not so kosher. Their preference is kneydl, and they nudged the NYT into the etymological shemozzle, suggesting the Bee graders may have been schnookered by the Indian boy — or goy, a Yiddish word for someone not of Jewish faith.
On Saturday, the hoary paper, in a needling article, reported with considerable chutzpah that not only is Mahankali, an eighth-grader from Queens, “son of immigrants from southern India,” but also “he has never eaten an actual knaidel.” Most reader responses did not accept the spiel though.
“'Why are words that are not English, particularly words that do not use the Roman alphabet, like Yiddish, used in a spelling bee?” one reader asked.
It was not the first time such a glitch was occurring at this year’s championship.
In an earlier round when Nikitha Chandran from Florida proved to judges that they had wrongly disqualified her for spelling the word “viruscide” the way she did, and that it was the third variant of the “viricide” and “virucide” — the only two entries in the spelling bee dictionary, they agreed and corrected their error, and Nikitha was added to the list of 41 semifinalists."
The buzz is that the US National Spelling Bee and its 2013 titlist Arvind Mahankali might not have been right on the matzo ball when it came to the winning word on Thursday. That’s the kvetch from Yiddish mavens cited in the New York Times, produced from the home of the largest Jewish diaspora in the world (New York City has more Jews than Jerusalem.)
Mahankali spelled out kn-a-i-d-e-l, a German word of Yiddish origin — which is a dough or dumpling that Jewish cooks put in chicken soup — to win the $30,000 prize ahead of 281 finalists. The Spelling Bee judges accepted the way he spelled it because that’s the way it’s laid out in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, bible for all worker bees and drones.
Merriam-Webster officials defended their choice of spelling as the most common variant of the word from a language that is about as alive as Sanskrit in India, and is written in the Hebrew, not Roman, alphabet.
But linguists at the Yiddish Scientific Institution YIVO say that’s not so kosher. Their preference is kneydl, and they nudged the NYT into the etymological shemozzle, suggesting the Bee graders may have been schnookered by the Indian boy — or goy, a Yiddish word for someone not of Jewish faith.
On Saturday, the hoary paper, in a needling article, reported with considerable chutzpah that not only is Mahankali, an eighth-grader from Queens, “son of immigrants from southern India,” but also “he has never eaten an actual knaidel.” Most reader responses did not accept the spiel though.
“'Why are words that are not English, particularly words that do not use the Roman alphabet, like Yiddish, used in a spelling bee?” one reader asked.
It was not the first time such a glitch was occurring at this year’s championship.
In an earlier round when Nikitha Chandran from Florida proved to judges that they had wrongly disqualified her for spelling the word “viruscide” the way she did, and that it was the third variant of the “viricide” and “virucide” — the only two entries in the spelling bee dictionary, they agreed and corrected their error, and Nikitha was added to the list of 41 semifinalists."
Now you know how, if journalists use strange words, the readers are at sea. One cannot turn to the dictionaries every time a strange word is used.
I have read some of these words, and wondered what they meant, in some American pulp fiction.
