Beware of intrusive stops
A message I got yesterday (noted more fully here) reminded me of something from the 2002 documentary Spellbound, which I saw earlier this year. The film follows 8 kids as they make their way to the National Spelling Bee championship in 1999. One of these kids is Harry Altman, a really smart, sweet, and precocious 11-year-old who unfortunately loses on the word “banns“. An article in The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles notes that this word “refers to a Christian marriage notice” and that Harry had never heard of it before because he’s Jewish. But in the film, Harry himself offers a completely different reason for getting the spelling wrong: the word was incorrectly pronounced by the spelling bee announcer as “bands”. (more…)
