Spelling bees turn into a craze

Who could have guessed there was this much drama in somebody trying to spell chrysanthemum?

Er, chrysanthamum.

Er, chris. . . .

Never mind.

It wasn't so long ago that spelling bees were nobody's idea of a good time.

Well, almost nobody. Arnold, the geeky kid with glasses who could not only spell ratiocination but use it in a sentence, thought they were just fine. But he was more likely to be a target of physical abuse than a hero of stage and screen.

But that was before the 2001 novel "Bee Season," the 2002 Oscar-nominated documentary "Spellbound," the 2005 Broadway musical "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee," the 2005 movie version of "Bee Season" and the new movie "Akeelah and the Bee" turned spelling bees — already a low-level phenomenon through the yearly ESPN broadcasts of the Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee — into a national obsession.

Now Arnold is a luminary. Er, lumanery.

Er, star.

"It's an American cultural phenomenon," says Rachel Sheinkin, who won a Tony for the book she wrote for "Putnam County Spelling Bee."

Other countries have no idea what we Yankees are up to when we ask children of nine to spell sesquipedalian in 10 seconds. In Australia, Sheinkin says, audiences found the down-under production of "Putnam County" exotically American.

"They didn't know what to make of it in Melbourne," Sheinkin says. "They loved it, and they made it their own. But they did not fully have a sense of competitive academics."

The key word is competitive. C-o-m-p-e-t-i-t-i-v-e. Competitive.

America, famously, is a competitive country — as every awkward kid who was ever picked last for the team knows too well.

The 19th century schoolmarms who invented the spelling bee (the term, possibly related to "quilting bee," first appears in print in 1825) probably had no intention of playing Vince Lombardi to six generations of class brainiacs.

They were just looking for a congenial way to reinforce the lessons of Noah Webster's popular spelling books, first published in 1786.