Spelling comes out of the closet

'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' put grammar in the spotlight. Now the focus is shifting to spelling - and a new kind of entertainment, reports Shane Hegarty.

If you hover over "accommodation" or are stumped by "millennium", then you'll have some sympathy for Akshay Buddiga. The 13-year-old Coloradan had made it to the final of the 77th Annual Scripps National Spelling Bee, a sort of Super Bowl of spelling, held in June.

In front of a live television audience of millions, a packed arena, a row of judges and his parents, he was asked to spell "alopecoid". Buddiga was about to answer when his legs went wobbly and he collapsed. The audience gasped. Judges rushed to help. But he rose slowly to his feet. He answered. A-l-o-p-e-c-o-i-d.

"It is the most bizarre and extraordinary moment I have ever witnessed," said Paige Kimble, the competition's director and the 1981 champion. "To me that's what you call grit." Buddiga recovered with a biscuit and a glass of water and returned to correctly spell "lyophilise", "tralatitious" and "scheherazadian" before falling at "schwarmerei". By the way, alopecoid means foxlike, but you probably knew that.

We are about to discover what the Americans have known for some time: spelling is great entertainment. This autumn the BBC hopes to re-create the drama of the US spelling bee - bee meaning meeting - when its series Hard Spell goes in search of Britain's best speller. It'll be the Pop Idol of literacy. "Spelling is compelling" is the show's motto.

Even the makers of Big Brother recognised the thrills behind a spelling competition when they posed a few teasers to housemates this year. Viewers could empathise when housemates failed on "entrepreneur", "balloon" and the tricky "onomatopoeia".

Perhaps it should be a surprise: Countdown, Channel 4's quiz show of letters and numbers, remains a hit after 22 years, with its presenter Carol Vorderman becoming the highest-paid woman on British television.

And now the publisher of Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves is following her popular book about punctuation with Accomodating Brocolli In The Cemetary, by Vivian Cook, newly installed professor of applied linguistics at Newcastle University and avid collector of spelling errors, linguistic inventions and puns. The book, which is more comparable to Schott's Original Miscellany, is replete with common mistakes, spelling tests and inventive ways to spell words.

Cook believes it's an exciting time for the language - "spelling has come out of the closet" - and he doesn't accept that this is a generation of particularly bad spellers. "I'm not a fan of this idea of the decline of the English language," he says. "I think that we measure the standards of spelling through how students do in exams, and to some extent that's when we're seeing students at their worst. Everyone goes to pieces. Having marked exam papers for 30 years, I would say it's always been the same."

Technology, however, has made being able to spell increasingly unnecessary. This is the spellchecker generation: one that learned to spell at school but grew up to find that their computers did the spelling for them. A squiggly red line under a word will let you know when you've gone wrong; a green one will tell you when you might be grammatically incorrect.

Of coarse, those who ewes spell chequers no they aren't all ways reliable. They don't pick up on homophones and sometimes don't even recognise commonly spoken words.

But Cook also denies the notion that technology, in particular text messaging, means the end of spelling as we know it. Instead, he argues that it has brought great creativity to the language. "Text messaging often leaves out vowels, but this is how Arabic writing works too. So, that English has been reinvented in this way is highly ingenious." Text messaging, he says, has helped us understand the rules of English better.

It is a belief shared by Inez Bailey, director of the National Adult Literacy Association. "Abbreviation is very clever, because you have to know how to spell a word in the first place before you can abbreviate it. Text messaging might actually be quite helpful." Even predictive text, the feature that makes it easier to spell words using a mobile-phone keypad, requires users to know the sequence of the letters in a word to get the word they want, she points out.

As her association does not rely purely on spelling as an indicator of literacy, she says it is difficult to tell if we are worse spellers than we used to be, but it is often problems with spelling that bring people to literacy courses. The most popular segment of Read Write Now, the television series that the association made with RTÉ, involved Ian Robertson, professor of psychology at Trinity College in Dublin, using songs as mnemonics for tricky spellings. Many of us struggle because we were taught to spell through memory tests rather than through understanding the words.

"The success of these books and programmes does help make it a more normal thing," says Bailey. "There are people who feel alone and stupid that they didn't pick it up at school, but these highlight that it's a very general issue, that lots of people have difficulty with spelling or grammar, perhaps because they weren't taught well or they've forgotten it. Spelling is a bit like a muscle, in that if you don't exercise it regularly then you can lose it."

She would love to see a competition such as Hard Spell on Irish screens. "There's lots you can do with educational broadcasting, and anything that generally promotes spelling is good."

Given its success abroad, it seems only a matter of time. For a decade the final of the Scripps spelling bee has been broadcast live on the leading US sports channel ESPN, attracting huge audiences to a drama that involves adolescent spellers failing at a rate of 21 every half-hour, and all the anguish that goes with it. Ten million participants begin the competition before the final 250 children, aged between 11 and 14, go into pitched battle. This year's winner, 14-year-old David Tidmarsh, walked away with $17,000 in prize money, a full set of Encyclopaedia Britannica, an engraved cup and, most importantly, the glamour of being the country's best speller. (He won with "autochthonous".)

The event recently spawned a successful documentary, Spellbound, and ESPN now also broadcasts tournament Scrabble, with $100,000 on offer to the winner.

For those still embarrassed by their inability to spell properly, Accomodating Brocolli In The Cemetary offers plenty of solace. Cook, who spent some time at Trinity, would tour Dublin with his camera, meaning his book is filled with photographs of poorly punctuated or inventively punning shop signs around the city.

Most encouraging is a section of the book revealing the errors that infested the manuscripts of some of English literature's finest writers. W. B. Yeats, for example, wrote of "sattelites" and "peculearitys". Bad spellers, then, can count themselves in illustrious company.

Accomodating Brocolli In The Cemetary by Vivian Cook is published by Profile Books, £9.99 in UK

How good are you?

Which is the right way to spell each of these words?

1. a) dessicate b) desiccate c) desicate

2. a) dumbel b) dumbbell c) dumbell

3. a) minuscule b) miniscule c) minniscule

4. a) iresistible b) irresistable c) irresistible

5. a) liaison b) liaision c) liason

6. a) harras b) harrass c) harass

7. a) pronounciation b) pronounceation c) pronunciation

8. a) wiered b) weird c) wierd

9. a) brocoli b) broccolli c) broccoli

10.a) recommend b) recomend c) reccommend

Answers

1. b; 2. b; 3. a; 4. c; 5. a; 6. c; 7. c; 8. b; 9. c; 10. a

Spellbound:

The words that 14-year-old David Tidmarsh spelled correctly to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee:

phalanx kiwi ombrophilous

succenturiate foudroyant

balancelle ecdysis politeia

serpiginous sumpsimus

sophrosyne arete gaminerie

autochthonous