While the 25th annual Literacy Council Corporate Spelling Bee was the Bee's Silver Anniversary, to the Texarkana, Ark. School District's Spelling Bee team the event was pure gold.
They came away as the overall spelling bee winners-having never entered the competition before.
TASD's team scored a upset for the Texarkana Gazette team, which as of last year had racked up 10 overall victories.
As the overall victors, the TASD team scored the winning knock-out in the final round when the Gazette team apparently missheard the pronunciation of the word "Centrifugal and instead mistakenly spelled the word "Centripetal." Centrifugal is a modern Latin word meaning " moving or directed from the center outward." By contrast, Centripetal is just the opposite. It means "directed or moving towards the center."
"We missheard the word and we thought it as centripetal instead of centrifugal," said Gazette team member Andrea Miller. "However we know that this contest is held every year for a good cause and we're always glad to participate."
TASD's team won by correctly spelling "pharmaceutical."
To mark their David versus Goliath victory, TASD's team celebrated by playing such songs as the Beatles "Revolution" as well as the rock group Queen's "We Will Rock You"
"I suppose we could have played the Rocky III movie song 'Eye of the Tiger' but we're TASD, not TISD-although I guess we could call it Eye of the Razorback," said TASD Spelling Bee Team member Naoma Riodan. "It's really good to get to win on our first time out."
During the contest's first round, words such as "gerrymander," "meteor," and "equilibrium" challenged competitors from CHRISTUS St. Michael Health Systems, Health Care Express and the Kiwanis Club of Texarkana as well as Texarkana Retired Teachers and Associated Family Therapists. Later on some of the other challenging words included: "fuselage," "liaison," "monsoon," "obsolete," "officious," "soliloquy," "vengeance," "ventilate," liege," " buoyancy," "connoisseur," and "hemorrhage."
This is the fourth time the bee was held at Silvermoon on Broad.