The two finalists still standing on the stage, on July 8 at the Scripps National Spelling Bee, were California 7th grader Chaitra Thummala and Louisiana 8th grader Zaila Avant-garde. After Chaitra misspelled ‘neroli oil’, Zaila won the big trophy by correctly spelling ‘murraya’ — a genus of Asiatic tress with pinnate leaves.
The rest of us, in America, generally have trouble with more common words, depending upon where we live.
Around the time of the National Spelling Bee each year, the folks at Google Trends typically release a map that shows which word, in each US state, appeared most often in Google’s spelling searches. Last year, the most popular spelling search in several different states was for the word “Quarantine”.
This year, for whatever reason, the word many people want to spell correctly is “Beautiful”.
Depending on where we live.
In 2021, the folks in Colorado — who last year got flummoxed by “Quarantine” — most often wanted to correctly spell “Colorado”. Probably a good idea.
The friendly folks in Alabama, meanwhile, needed to know the spelling of “Georgia”.
The shortest word to be popular this year was the word “Gray” in Tennessee, which may have gone hand-in-hand with the search for the word “Color” in neighboring Kentucky.
For some reason, the folks in Nebraska sought the spelling for “Miscellaneous”. Why anyone in Nebraska would need to write that particular word correctly, is something of a mystery. Same question applies to the Alaskans, who searched for “Explicitly”.
Some other curious patterns are worth noting. Almost all of the states where folks were searching for the spelling of “Beautiful” — New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Oregon, Nevada and California — voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election. (We are unable to explain why North Dakota also searched for “Beautiful”.) The state that gave Donald Trump the largest percentage of votes — Wyoming, with 70% voting for the Republican ticket — wanted to know how to spell “Substitute.” The largest electoral percentage for Joe Biden — 93%— came from the District of Columbia, which had trouble spelling “Balance” this year.
Both Arizona and Indiana were struggling with the spelling of “Friend.” Vermont was the lone state seeking to spell “Exorbitant” correctly.
The most popular word searched in Connecticut — “bougie” — I was not actually familiar with. “Bougie” (which is pronounced “boo-zhee”, and can also be spelled “Boujee”, according to Dictionary.com) is a sloppy and disparaging contraction of the French word, “bourgeois”. “Bougie” was defined in a 2017 USA Today article as a word “.. used to describe high-end tastes, like driving your Prius to get avocado toast after SoulCycle.”
It’s hard for me to keep up with East Coast slang, living in the Middle of Nowhere, Colorado.
A slightly older article by Madison Moore in ThoughtCatalog.com lists “32 Things Bougie People Like.” Presumably, these bougie items would apply especially to people from Connecticut. Such as:
- Milk that doesn’t come from cows
- Lexus automobiles
- Liberal Arts colleges
- Organic foods
- Reading or discussing articles in The New Yorker magazine
- Season tickets
- Recycling
Also in Ms. Moore’s list: Connecticut.
It seems to me many of the terms Americans are searching for tend to apply to somewhat abstract concepts. “Because” in Texas, Washington and Delaware. “Quiet” in Wisconsin. “Equal” in South Dakota. “Nemesis” in Idaho.
So I was happy to see Missouri get down to earth, and search for “Fertilizer.”
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.