That Time I Invented a Word During a Spelling Bee

I should not have been selected to compete

I read somewhere that your spelling skills live in a different part of your brain from your writing skills – and from the rest of your intelligence, for that matter. I’ve held onto this tidbit for a long time, comforted by the thought that my terrible spelling lives on its own little floor of my brain, safely kept away from everything else. Of course, whenever I have to spell something without spell check – a rarity (rareity?) but something that does happen – I have to press the elevator button and face what’s up there. 

“Your dad was a terrible speller, too,” my mom told me when I was a kid, half to comfort me and half to pass the DNA blame. It was a very visual problem to have in the paper-heavy ’90s. My writing assignments in school had the potential to score well, save for the red marks with spelling corrections sullying the papers. 

Which makes it all the more surprising that I found myself in the finals of my middle school’s spelling bee.

My teacher had asked my classmates and me to form a big circle around the classroom. She gave us words one by one, and whoever spelled their word wrong had to sit down at one of the desks in the middle. As it began, I was already preparing to be comfortably seated soon.

When my turn came around, I got the easiest word out of the group. I’d be lying if I said I remembered what it was – maybe interstate, a very well-spelled word if I can offer my expert opinion. Or maybe cheese or pretzel, the two ingredients of my favorite dish to make at that age (melted cheese on pretzels). My turn came again, with maybe 30% of the students eliminated. It was another easy word. And then another. And then another. 

Soon I was standing all alone, being informed that I’d be taking the show on the road to the school-wide spelling bee. It was to be held in the gym using the most terrifying object a 7th grader can encounter – a microphone. I should’ve tried to get out of it somehow, but a little part of me thought I’d found my opportunity to redeem myself for all those little red marks. Maybe I was secretly a spelling genius, but my geniusness (the little red squiggly is trying to tell me that’s not a word) was only just emerging. I was willing to take that chance.

It was a bold decision for a kid as shy as I was. Only a few months prior, I’d become so nervous during a class presentation that my hands started shaking. It might not have been a big problem, except this particular presentation involved holding a three-tier poster board up while speaking – a cruel and unusual punishment for a middle schooler. I was still talking – my voice didn’t fail me – as I began to lose my grip on my board, shaking it all the way to the ground while I was still rambling on about the lifecycle of frogs or something.

I think I can pick out adults who didn’t go through a shy phase. Like a realtor I once met, whose abrasive confidence seemed like a deflection for the exaggerations he was fond of telling. Or my former boss, who was always encouraging everyone in the office to be competitive and aggressive. Basically, I can pick them out because they’re the people that give me the heebie-jeebies. 

It might be healthy to go through a shy phase. I have zero studies to link to prove this is assumption is correct. But do you really trust someone who was always comfortable speaking in front of groups of people since before they consistently wore deodorant? I can only relate to people who were an absolute disaster of shyness and nerves from the ages of 12-15.

On the day of the spelling bee, I sat at a beige table with maybe ten or so other students in the middle of the gym. There was no pomp or circumstance to the occasion, not even a streamer in sight. Just a bare table and black wires leading to the microphone.

When it was my turn, I dutifully stood up and went to the mic. I thought maybe that would be the moment when I’d locate my missing confidence. It could all start with spelling a couple of words in that dingy gym with hundreds of eyes on me.

I heard my word being called by the moderator, but it didn’t sound like one I’d ever heard before.

“Can you repeat the word?” I asked. This was one of the rules they had spelled out: You can ask for a repeat, if needed. But the quality of the speaker system at my middle school in Iowa in 1998 was perhaps not the greatest.

“Pludge,” I heard a second time. There was no rule given for what to do if you didn’t understand the word twice. There was also no rule given for if the moderator said a word that doesn’t exist in the dictionary but sounded vaguely like a curse word or something you might do through snow.

There was only one thing to do. Standing there, holding my quivering hands tightly together, I spelled the word I heard.

“P-L-U-D-G-E,” I said into the microphone, followed by a slight bow to acknowledge that I was finished (which was not one of the rules). After a long pause, I was eliminated and went back to the table, where I remained seated for the remainder of the competition.