Tips For Fellow Contestants In Today's Barstool Spelling Bee
Yesterday a power ranking came out for today’s contestants in the Barstool Spelling Bee. Not to brag, but I’m listed among the Top 5 along with a comedian, a golfer, a ghost, and a rapper.
Because I’m a gracious lady & a good sport, I want to share some tips that we can all reference before the ‘Bee starts (ACROSS ALL PLATFORMS AT 4PM-ISH TODAY #PLUG). And I assure you this isn’t some sneaky Patriots move; I’m not here to deflate your verbal balls, friends. You can trust me.
1) Stay calm no matter wath happens.
2) E before I: ‘E’ comes before ‘I’ when the sound is a long ‘I’ except after the letter C. Examples: releive, releif, repreive. Notice the change when there’s a ‘C ‘preceding the EI: reciept, recieve, cieling, decieve, concieve.
3) I before E: ‘I’ before ‘E’ when the sound is a ‘long A’. Examples: wieght, frieght, riegn.
4) Keep the ‘E': We usually keep the final silent “E” when we add vowel suffix endings, for examples:
excite + able = exciteable
large – largeish
sense + ible = senseible
5) If the word sounds like it might have originated in another country, ignore that. There’s no spelling clues there, because we’ve taken it and molded it totally as our own, and you don’t want to seem unAmerican.
6) Please don’t get nervous up there thinking about how it’s never too late for your family to feel shame and/or stop loving you because they see you embarrass yourself online very publicly after they worked so hard & put themselves in severe, life crippling debt to send you to college. Just relax.
Tips aside.. if I’m being honest, I don’t think my odds are very good. I once dropped out of college with a 1.8 GPA, & a lot of the remaining brain cells in my Miller Time lovin’ head have died since then. I’m also overthinking this already & making it more difficult, as I tend to do.. but what if they throw us curveballs & have us spell athlete’s last names or something? Toriiii Hunter has four flipping ‘I’s.. how would anyone remember that? It just wouldn’t be fair. Rori Mac’Illroy has an apostrophe in his last name – do we have to include that if we’re asked? Agh, I just hope this helps & isn’t getting everyone nervous like I am.
On the off-chance I do win, please expect a follow-up blog noting that the paragraph above is just me playing dumb, and I fully expected victory.
Final note – quick shout out to Brett for letting me know he wasn’t even born yet when I was losing my first spelling bee to the word “doubt” in Elementary School. Helpful.