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Lycoming County venue cancels Kathy Griffin comedy show

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Outdoors with Tom Venesky: A perilous time for nesting birds

<p>Dispelling one myth right off: Spelling bees are not simply rote learning and regurgitation. They are intense, enervating competitions.. It pays to understand word origins and evolution, language nuances and pronunciation quirks.</p><p>Spelling may be the quintessential example of &#8220;easy to learn, a lifetime to master.&#8221;</p><p>So when Jessica Crawford told the Times Leader she cried tears of pride while watching her daughter Cassidy on stage in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, believe that the emotion was very real and ran very deep.</p><p>Cassidy won the regional spelling bee &#8212; sponsored by Times Leader and The Medicine Shoppe &#8212; in a nail-biter that went 17 rounds and included the words dunnage (temporary bracing in a storage compartment), purblind (lacking in vision), palfrey (a saddle horse) and discalced (barefoot), to name a few.</p><p>When her lone remaining competitor Madison Waltz misspelled Grundyism (narrow conventionality), Cassidy won the regional bee by first spelling parvule (a tiny pill) correctly, then spelling the championship word carbide (a binary compound of carbon.)</p><p>The spelling didn&#8217;t get any easier at the national bee in Washington, D.C. Consider some of the words she was asked to spell in the preliminary round, before even getting on stage: Bowyer (a maker/seller of archer&#8217;s bows), sortilege (telling the future with cards), filar (relating to a thread or line), theriatrics (veterinary medicine), achromatopsia (color blindness and hypersensitivity to bright light), canaille (common people), and the misleading macaronic (nothing to do with pasta, everything to do with words jumbled from one language into the context of another).</p><p>Once on stage, Cassidy nailed equerry (the person tending horses on an estate), but inserted only one &#8220;n&#8221; in tyrannically (oppressive, arbitrary manner in using power). She certainly can be forgiven for the error. After all, the root word is tyrant.</p><p>(By the way, the winning word at the national bee was &#8220;marocain,&#8221; a heavy crepe fabric)</p><p>All of 14, Cassidy is the oldest girl and second oldest sibling in a family of 10, so one suspects she has some notion of coping with competition and pressure. She was chosen captain of two teams she plays on, soccer and basketball, so it&#8217;s safe to assume she has some people and leadership skills (her dream job is to become president of the United States).</p><p>The national bee began 90 years ago with nine newspapers teaming as host. These days it involves about 11 million spellers participating in school bees nationwide before they are winnowed to those who spend a week in Washington. This year, that was 291 youngsters.</p><p>Cassidy represents that other side of scholastic competition that too frequently goes under-appreciated: the champions not of gym and field but of books and serious study time. The two aren&#8217;t mutually exclusive,but it is the physical athlete who often reaps the lion&#8217;s share of attention.</p><p>Here&#8217;s to her and others who show us there is more than one way to spell success.</p><style>
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Our view: We are proud of spelling bee participants