Word On!

I decided to attend the Great Canadian Spell-Off (Event 37) this morning as part of the Vancouver Writer's Festival.

This year's teams were a rematch from last year: the Vancouver Sun and the CBC once again battling for the title of supreme orthographer.

Entering your name in a basket gave two lucky winners the chance to join one of the teams on stage. I wasn't interested in humiliating myself in front of the 80 or so people that were there (not to mention the well known print and radio personalities), so I didn't enter my name.

However, someone else decided it would be a funny joke.

When the winners were announced, I was suprised to hear "Alistair Calder" drawn.

How odd, I thought, that someone else would have the exact same name as me.

I looked around for a moment with rising dread. It wasn't someone else...it was me.

Amidst the polite applause, I walked up on stage and joined the team from CBC Radio. I was sincerely frightened.

CBC Radio was up first with an easy one: Uvea. Assuring my new team mates that I knew the answer, I volunteered it and was correct. Though it was an easy one, I felt more comfortable now.

Next was the 'sacrificial lamb' round where two members of a team are offered up as contestants and are not allowed to discuss their answer with team mates. You had to spell the word and give a definition.

It was: Ternate (the adjective)

The Vancouver Sun was to go first and Stewart Muir (National Editor, Vancouver Sun) gave an engineering definition about lines intersecting. He was wrong.

Now it was my turn: I said that it was the arched structure atop ancient Roman structures. I was wrong.

The audience was then polled, and though many tried, no one got the correct definition:

Arranged in or consisting of sets or groups of three

After a few more games, with words like vichyssoise, vigneron, triboluminescence, dittography and galluses and vilify, the score was tied.

With a final chance to score a point, we were given words that had to have a correct definition attached to them.

My word? Cybersquatter.

It must have been my lucky day.

For my efforts, I was awarded a copy of the Companion to Canadian Literature.