The great Beverly Sills liked to say, “There are no shortcuts to any place worth going,” and that’s certainly true for opera singers, but it’s equally true about great spelling bee competitors.  Great spelling at the bee level requires study and practice, usually using the word lists provided by Scripps National Spelling Bee, a nonprofit event sponsored by the American broadcaster, the E.W. Scripps Company, since 1925.  Every year they produce a 4,000-word “Words of Champions” list, that includes 800 new ones drawn from the big, fat 470,000-word Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary.  That’s a lot to study, but the winners get more than acclaim and  nice lifelong additions to their resumes.  For example, the 2008 winner, a 13-year-old eighth grader from Indiana won $35,000 in cash and another $5,000 in prizes by correctly spelling “macédoine,” “basenji,” “numnah,” “chorion,” “nacarat,” “sinicize,” “hyphaeresis,” “taleggio,” “esclandre,” and “guerdon” in that order.

            The “Words of Champions” were used in the Literacy Council of Alaska’s 33rd annual BizBee contest, where local businesses and organizations sponsor teams of spellers who compete sheerly for the honor of being notable spellers and raising money to promote Literacy.  I’ve judged the last thirty BizBees, and they’re always a hoot, and this year’s teams were so good we almost ran out of words, especially during this year’s “Showdown.”  When down to the final two teams the Showdown rules take effect: when team A misspells a word, team B gets a crack at it.  If B succeeds and correctly spells the following word, they win.  But if B misspells the first word or the second word, the cycle begins again with team A.  Fittingly, the AAHkword Bees, sponsored by Aging at Home Fairbanks and IBEW 1547, won by getting theopneustic (“divinely inspired”) correct. 

            Studying Scrabble word lists is also crucial for success, especially for serious international competitors, and there’s none better than New Zealander Nigel Richards, according to theGuardian.com article “Scrabble Star Wins Spanish World Title – Despite Not Speaking Spanish.” Last December he beat 150 competitors from 20 countries in Granada, after earlier winning the French Scrabble title multiple times, again with no French language skills, after “he reportedly memorized the entire French Scrabble dictionary in nine weeks.”  That’s also how he won in Spain.  “After nearly three decades of playing Scrabble competitively, Richards is widely viewed as the best player of all time, with some chalking up his skills to his photographic memory and ability to quickly calculate mathematical probabilities.  That’s beyond us lesser mortals, but everyone has access to a public library packed with self-help resources, including vocabulary building.  And for that reading fiction has proven to be effective and pleasant.

            Few possess photographic recall, but the rest of us can take heart from an Inc.com article by Jeff Haden, “A Johns Hopkins Study Reveals the Scientific Secret to Double How Fast You Learn.” Haden wrote, “When you’re trying to gain expertise, how much you practice is definitely important.  But even more important is the way you practice. Most people simply repeat the same moves …. over and over again in the hopes you will master that task.  Not only will your skills not improve as quickly as they could, in some cases, they may actually get worse.  According to recent research from Johns Hopkins, ‘What we found is if you practice a slightly modified version of a task you want to master, you actually learn more and faster than if you just keep practicing the exact same thing multiple times in a row’.” The most likely cause is reconsolidation, a process where existing memories are recalled and modified with new knowledge.  There are caveats, however; “you can’t adjust the conditions more than slightly. Do something too different and you’ll simply create new memories — not reconsolidated ones.”  And “you’ll also need to space out your practice sessions appropriately. The researchers gave the participants a six-hour gap between training sessions, because neurological research indicates it takes that long for new memories to reconsolidate.”   

            While an erratic authority like Gary Busey advised “If you take shortcuts, you get cut short,” the truly brilliant Italian author Italo Calvino pointed out that “What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one’s nose, taking shortcuts.”  Such is the case with English second-person pronouns.  In “The Search for Plural You” written by University of Illinois professor Dennis Barron, he wrote that “there’s no singular ‘you’. ‘You’ began life as a plural pronoun. ‘You’ is still plural. And with any luck, ‘you’ will remain plural despite the fact that so many of you insist it’s singular.”  In the 5^th century “when undocumented Germanic immigrants came to England in small boats and imposed their language on unsuspecting Celts—English (or anglisc or whatever it was called back then) had two second person pronouns: singular ƿu and plural ʒeow …. These pronouns became singular thou and plural you.  But then someone decided, ‘Hey, who needs two pronouns when one will do?’ and around Shakespeare’s time people started saying you for both the plural and the singular. Nobody knows exactly why. Pronouns change.”  Today “you” is considered “basically singular, so instead we develop these specifically-plural you forms like you guys, youse, y’all, and yinz.  Which people then complain about.”

            Some of us are ardent users of the excellent verbal shortcut “y’all,” a contraction of “you all” and the only grammatically legitimate second person pronoun in English.  “You-all” is merely two hyphenated terms, and as the big, fat unabridged American Heritage Dictionary noted, “Perhaps the single most famous feature of Southern United States dialects is the pronoun y’all, a more familiar and informal form of you-all, a second person plural pronoun. But while the two forms share this plural function, y’all is a more versatile pronoun that is used in a variety of situations in which you-all is not …. Language researcher Michael Montgomery has identified a number of situations in which y’all is used as a unique pronoun rather than as a simple contraction of you-all”: The ‘associative’ plural (as in “What are y’all doing tonight?”),  2. the ‘institutional plural (“Do y’all sell marine paint?”), 3. the ‘potential’ plural (as in ‘Did y’all take out the trash yet?”),  and 4. the ‘everybody’ plural, as in greetings and partings.”  I especially admire the triple contraction of y’all’d’ve for “you all would have.”

            The very first weekly column I wrote for the Daily News Miner 34 years ago was about the contentious theories of the origin of “OK.”  Professor Allan Metcalf’s book, “The Improbable History of ‘OK’” affirmed my beliefs on the topic 15 years ago when it was published.  In the proverbial nutshell, in the early 1800s using funny acronyms became a fad among East coast newspaper writers and young adults, and they created elaborate acronyms like “O.K.K.B.W.P.” (“one kind kiss before we part”).  Webster’s “The Hilarious History of ‘OK’” noted “The 1820s and 1830s shared another linguistic fad with today: an appreciation for deliberate misspellings. (Kewl, rite?)” as in turning “no use” into “know yuse.” “Abbreviations were not immune, and no go became K.G.. So too all right became O.W., as an abbreviation for oll wright. And all correct became o.k., as an abbreviation for oll korrect.”  It wasn’t until a couple of decades later that Martin Van Buren, who hailed from Kinderhook, NY, ran for president and his supporters gave him the nickname “Old Kinderhook” as a play on the earlier OK fad.  That spread OK around the country and now, across the globe.  “There are today still those who believe that ‘Old Kinderhook’ is the original meaning of OK.”  But they’re wrong.

Internet communication is rife with shortcut communications, as Stanford marketing student David Fang described last month in “Why You Should Think Twice Before Using Shorthand Like ‘thx’ and ‘k’ in Your Texts.”  He “wanted to know whether these clipped missives might undermine genuine dialogue,” did some experimentation, and found “that those tiny shortcuts – sometimes hailed as a hallmark of efficient communication – undermine relationships instead of simplifying them …. In a survey we conducted of 150 American texters ages 18 to 65, 90.1% reported regularly using abbreviations in their daily messages, and 84.2% believed these shortcuts had either a positive effect or no meaningful impact on how the messages were perceived by the recipients.” But our findings suggest that the mere inclusion of abbreviations, although seemingly benign, start feeling like a brush-off. In other words, whenever a texter chops words down to their bare consonants, recipients sense a lack of effort, which causes them to disengage.  Sometimes, as Egyptian historian Charles Issawi, pointed out, “a shortcut is the longest distance between two points.”