Who Will Win the 2015 Scripps National Spelling Bee?

(Note: This piece is intended to be a lighthearted take on a fun event; those looking for serious bee analysis should look elsewhere.)

There isn't a sporting event I look forward to more every year than the Scripps National Spelling Bee. (Maybe the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.) Lest you think I'm being sarcastic, try tuning in this year—it airs Wednesday and Thursday on various ESPN affiliates, with the finals in primetime at 8pm Thursday. It's nothing less than the purest form of human drama, as the best of us—our children—grapple with the worst: fear, crippling expectations, fainting (yes!), crushing defeats (no!), and, of course, the maddening phonetic rules of the English language. The tics, the techniques, the aha moments, the dulcet tones of Dr. Jacques Bailly—these are what help make the bee surprisingly spellbinding television.

Of course, for one* child a year, the pressure forges something special; the lights go up, their shoulders untense, and they are named national spelling bee champion. (*Except last year, when co-champions were controversially crowned for the first time in 52 years.) Two hundred and eighty five contestants will walk into the Gaylord National Convention Center this week, but so many are just there for window dressing. Close bee watchers know the prize will come down to one of the few favorites, many of whom are already well known in this universe; there's Vanya Shivashankar, whose sister won the 2009 bee; Gokul Venkatachalam, who finished third in 2014; Tejas Muthusamy, who turned heads with a phenomenal rookie performance last year; and a short list of others.

So who should you bet on this year? (Note: Please don't bet on how smart a kid is.) It's all about who has tended to win the bee in the past. Thanks to the spelling bee website's official speller roster, complete with bios and a statistics page, we can compare each participant's profile to those of past winners. Obviously, the bee is a competition for who is the best at spelling, not at who checks the most demographic boxes. But just for fun, we can paint a pretty good composite portrait of a bee winner, based on the following characteristics of the past 17 champions:

• Race. We might as well start here, since everyone else does. I shouldn't have to tell everyone not to use racial stereotypes in predicting a bee winner, but the fact remains that Indian Americans dominate the bee. Thirteen of the past 17 champions, including the last eight in a row, have been of Indian descent; the remaining four were white. How you interpret that is up to you.
• Gender. Eleven of the past 17 winners were male, while six were female. However, four of the last seven have been girls. (Fun with arbitrary endpoints!) Again, please be reminded that these are not causal relationships and that this whole exercise is tongue-in-cheek. For what it's worth, the list of 2015 bee finalists actually features more girls (146) than boys (139).
• Age. As you might imagine, the older, the better. Fourteen of the last 17 champs were eighth-graders, the oldest you can be to qualify for the bee. (This is a much higher proportion than the share of eighth-grade participants, which this year is 41.5%.) The remaining three were seventh-graders, so it would be pretty shocking to see anyone in sixth grade or below take home the trophy.
• Experience. Closely related to age is a contestant's prior experience on the national level. All but one of the past 17 winners had been a national bee finalist before, making it quite likely that we've seen 2015's champion on that stage already. The more times you've been to the national bee before, the more it helps, although second-timers do just fine, accounting for six of the 17. There are 57 returnees this year, including 17 on their third, fourth, or fifth try. (If you're looking for a shortlist of favorites, you could do a lot worse than those 17, who are all also in seventh grade or older.)
• School type. Perhaps surprisingly, champs have been most likely to go to public school. Nine of the past 17 were enrolled in public school, six were enrolled in private school, and two were home-schooled. However, when you compare this to the overall list of contestants (at least this year's), that's actually an underrepresentation of public-school kids (who are two-thirds of the overall pool) and a dramatic oversampling of private- (23.9%) and home-schooled (4.6%) students.
• Hometown. Finally, there is pretty good geographic diversity among the last 17 champs: three Californians, two New Yorkers, two Texans, two Hoosiers, a Floridian, a Missourian, a Kansan, a Coloradan, a Minnesotan, a New Jerseyan, a Pennsylvanian, and an Ohioan. Nothing really to go off here.

So, if you subscribe to past as prologue, you'd expect an Indian American eighth grader who has been to the bee before to emerge as the winner on Thursday night. Of course, when you watch the bee, it's worth remembering that all these kids are already winners, even if they're eventual losers at the bee: virtually guaranteed to go on to elite schools and careers, they're sure as heck smarter than all of us!

Don't Blame Rick Weiland. Blame a Hyberbole Culture Run Amok

This week, Democratic candidate for US Senate Rick Weiland earned widespread ridicule when he made the following statement about the McCutcheon v. FEC campaign-finance case:

"Today's decision of the United States Supreme Court to strike down any real limit on the purchase of our democracy by big money may be the worst decision made by any Supreme Court since the Dred Scott case reaffirmed slavery in 1857."

Taken at face value, this is of course a laughable claim. Decisions such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Korematsu v. US are appalling pretty much without any partisan debate. But Weiland doesn't deserve all the flak he's getting, either. The reason for this is simple: this statement clearly was not intended to be taken at face value.

Instead, Weiland—who has based his entire campaign on being the anti-big-money candidate—was trying to make a point, and he knew how to get a megaphone with which to announce it: exaggerate. Sure enough, it worked, as a candidate to whom pundits were giving virtually no media attention—nor any chance of winning—suddenly had his name plastered across the internet. In a world which Weiland had discovered was not going to pay any attention to a nonserious message candidate in a prairie state, he realized that he would have to be outlandish to cut through.

Weiland's not the only one who's realized this. Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson called Citizens United "the worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case" in 2010. Now-Senator Ed Markey once said, "The Dred Scott decision had to be repealed; we have to repeal Citizens United." And at least one conservative columnist wrote that 2012's "Obamacare decision represented the greatest single judicial limitation on American liberty since Dred Scott v. Sandford."

It's an unfortunate byproduct of our extremely noisy era that people feel they must resort to extreme hyperbole to get fairly standard points across. There's a language cold war going on—one that has already ruined the word "literally"—whereby everyone competes to out-emphasize each other. Words and phrases that used to be saved for special occasions are now seen as feeble thanks to overuse—and thanks to being overtaken by even more extreme words and phrases. "X is the worst Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott" has simply evolved into the fashionable way to say, "I think X Supreme Court decision was pretty bad."

It's unfortunate. But it's the reality we've created for ourselves, so we shouldn't be surprised. And, ironically, that probably means we should stop remarking upon it every time someone says a decision is the worst since Dred Scott. But, grimly, that will just mean soldiers in this cold war will have to move on to the next, even more outrageous statement to express their dissatisfaction with the high court.

Weiland isn't stupid. I sincerely doubt he believes McCutcheon is the worst Supreme Court decision since 1857. (For one thing, it's hard to believe he doesn't find Citizens United even worse.) But he believed it "may be" (his exact words in the statement, by the way), and he believed everyone should know it was really, really bad. In today's world, that calls for rhetoric dialed up to 11—and I think Weiland knew exactly what he was doing when he borrowed this well-worn, attenton-getting figure of speech. The worst Weiland is really guilty of here is resorting to cliché.

Sentence-Diagramming the Second Amendment

The political drama over guns may not be over yet. This week, Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) announced his intention to re-introduce his failed compromise bill expanding background checks for gun purchases. President Obama certainly doesn't sound ready to give up on the issue either, and ordinary Americans seem angry enough to lash back at senators who voted to kill the only gun-control legislation that seemed realistic in the wake of the Newtown shooting.

Although many will argue that it was the electoral coercion of the NRA, several senators who voted "no" cited the Second Amendment as the reason why. This is a common tactic—pro-gun advocates throwing constitutional rights into every debate about guns—even when it isn't terribly relevant. That's a problem, in my view; we should all try to adhere to the Constitution, but it's hard to do that when the actual meaning of the Bill of Rights is diluted. Second Amendment advocates actually hurt their own cause by citing it too often. To determine if an assault-weapons ban or universal background checks really are a threat to our Second Amendment rights, we must first understand the content and language of the Second Amendment.

For public information, here is what the Second Amendment actually says:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Intelligent people can have intelligent disagreements about how to interpret this sentence, especially since it is a particularly confusing piece of the law of the land. There are too many nouns and not enough verbs, for one thing; for another, what's up with all the commas?

Well, first off, don't worry so much about all the commas. Commas were used a lot more freely—and haphazardly—in colonial times than they are today. Different copies of the Constitution, transcribed by different printers, have different numbers of commas. Back then, it was simply a punctuation mark inserted to give speakers (remember, the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were read from public places across the colonies) cues on where to pause and take a breath. Apparently it was even the British legal tradition at the time to disregard commas when interpreting statues—they were considered annotations more than parts of the text.

Now that we have codified grammatical rules to an extent that was unimaginable—even impossible—in the 18th century, we have also abandoned the once-common practice of inserting commas between subjects and their predicates. That accounts for the two Second Amendment commas that look weirdest to the modern eye: the first ("Militia, being") and the third ("Arms, shall"). Take those out, and you're left with two clear clauses regardless of what you do with the second, middle comma.

The second half ("the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed") is the money phrase and the independent clause of the amendment—in other words, it's the main idea. This seems great for gun advocates—except it's not the only idea. We also have to figure out what to do with the dependent, participial clause that begins the sentence: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State."

Those who have studied Latin will recognize this immediately as an ablative absolute clause. Under this Latin device, an entire string of words before the main idea of a sentence would be put in the ablative case, which is used to express means or accompaniment (i.e., it's used after the word "with"). Here's an example:

Omnibus paratis, familia discessit ad urbem.
With everything prepared, the family departed for the city.

It's a construction we still use in English sometimes, as the non-awkwardness of the translation suggests. However, in Latin, the ablative absolute is used for a special reason: to express purpose. Therefore, a less literal, but more colloquial, translation would be, "Since everything was ready, the family departed for the city."

If you were to translate the Second Amendment into Latin and then back into English, the best translation would read something like, "Since a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." That establishes a much clearer causal link for the right to bear arms with the necessity of a "well-regulated militia." This gives rise to the liberal interpretation of the amendment.

However, since the Bill of Rights is, in fact, not written in Latin, the true meaning is open for debate. Progressive legal scholars like Jeffrey Toobin observe that, for much of American history, the right to bear arms was only understood in the context of protecting state militias. Only in the late 1970s, Toobin argues, when the Republican Party was making its hard turn to the right, did the NRA campaign successfully to alter the national perception of the amendment to cover individual citizens' gun rights. To Toobin, that makes the individual-rights interpretation wrong. However, it can also be convincingly argued that the organized-militia-only interpretation flew in the face of the actual, original intent by the Framers. Colonial-era writing samples suggest that the phrase "bear arms" was a deliberate choice and specifically refers, then as now, to individual possession of weapons, not the military use of them.

What is clear is that the relationship between the first clause and the second clause is the key to understanding the amendment's meaning: does the dependent clause qualify or restrict the independent one or not? On one hand, the first half could be a specific and exclusive raison d'être for the entire main clause, in the full spirit of the ablative absolute, as if the Bill of Rights had been written in Latin itself. Or the first clause could just be irrelevant fluff, a throwaway statement that may be tangentially true but does not affect the amendment's main point; it might as well not even be there. The middle ground is that the first clause is neither meaningless nor decisive; it provides a context, and perhaps an explanation, for the main thrust of the amendment, but it doesn't take anything away from the core meaning.

So are background checks unconstitutional? You can argue that they do take away certain citizens' rights to bear arms, or that they obstruct law-abiding citizens' rights even if they do get their guns in the end. But background checks also fit perfectly with the idea of a "well-regulated" gun-toting population, should you accept the liberal or the moderate interpretation of the Second Amendment. Anything short of denying the relevance of the first clause, and you acknowledge that the Constitution believes regulation of guns is important. (Ironically, conservatives who deny that are thus also denying any similarities between the Second Amendment's structure and the ablative absolute of Latin—many conservatives' favorite language.) However, many of the senators who claimed that they believed background checks violated the Second Amendment were moderates, even Democrats—not conservative ideologues.

If you believe in the hard-right interpretation of the Second Amendment, that's fine. But I don't think these swing-vote senators on the background-checks bill do. Given their overall philosophies and temperaments, a much more nuanced view of Second Amendment law seems likely. Maybe they too, like the rest of us, need a grammatical lesson and a refresher on what the Constitution actually says.

Go Ahead, Say "Sequester"

What do you call something automatic, self-inflicted, and worth $85 billion in cuts to the US government and economy?

To millions of people, the answer is "the sequester." But grammar wags on Twitter and elsewhere insist the real answer is "sequestration." The former, they claim, is incorrect grammar and a fine example of DC jargon.

I'm a grammar wag too, but this is amateur hour by most of my compatriots, who often love nothing more than to tell the ignorant public they're misusing a word or misconstructing a sentence. There is actually nothing wrong with using "the sequester" to describe the automatic spending cuts that went into effect last Friday, and it's particularly brazen to claim otherwise, given that their usage of "sequestration" is as artificial as the back-formation of "sequester."

The best-known meaning of "sequestration" is the act of being sequestered (i.e., hidden away), but the political use derives (as do so many of the people in politics) from the legal sphere. In a legal dispute, when two parties cannot agree on something, some valuable assets of theirs are taken away by the court as a kind of collateral; this action is called "sequestration." That's certainly a fitting way to describe our current congressional stalemate—but also apparently one in 1985, when the idea of budget sequestration was first instituted. Specifically, the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Act of 1985 provided that, if Congress authorized more spending appropriations than it provided for in its annual budget, then a series of automatic cuts would take place to balance them out.

That bill in 1985 marked only the first use of the word "sequestration" in politics, and this usage is not yet recognized by mainstream dictionaries such as the Oxford English, Merriam-Webster, or (my favorite) American Heritage. The usage that self-appointed grammar purists are disingenuously defending is made up—and only 28 years old to boot.

By definition, then, it's also government jargon, which is exactly the charge being leveled at "the sequester." If anything, "sequester" is actually more legitimate—it was invented and popularized by the general public, while "sequestration" was invented and promoted by legislation wonks. The first rule, after all, that grammarians must get used to is that usage drives grammar, not the other way around. Elites don't dictate the rules; the people who actually speak and use the language en masse do. A language is only correct insofar as people understand it. As we stand today, "the sequester" seems to be much more popular than "sequestration"; it's used five times more often on Twitter. Maybe people are attracted to the fact that it's shorter, easier to spell, and easier to say than "sequestration"—sounds like a sensible evolution of language to me. As long as we're making up terms, why don't we make one up for this particular fiscal fight that actually rolls off the tongue?

Many people's problem seems to be that "sequester" is used as a noun but supposed to be a verb. This is a silly objection. Verbs become nouns all the time, and nouns like "move" and "invite" likewise make language easier to use. No one objects to them today the way that "ask" and "get" are pilloried, but only because their use over time has cemented them as part of the lexicon. It's also hypocritical that elites get all worked up about corporate and government misuses of words, but they give a free pass and even praise to poets and playwrights who commit the same "crime." I am thinking specifically of Act III, Scene 4 of William Shakespeare's Othello, which declares, "this hand of yours requires / A sequester from liberty, fasting and prayer." Shakespeare frequently made up words—countless of which I bet are fixtures of your vocabulary—to fit his metrical patterns, and on line 40 he uses "sequester" as a one-for-one substitute for "sequestration." "Sequester" critics, please redirect your rant to the Bard.

To complain about "sequester" is to be selective and inconsistent in your application of the rules of language. At its worst, it smacks of self-righteous armchair grammarians looking to pick a petty fight. Those who take the time, however, to actually consider how language works cannot deny that both variations have their problems and yet both are still perfectly acceptable to use. Like the sequester itself, the grammatical backlash against its epithet is simply a manufactured crisis.

Rick Perry is Literally a Dead Man Walking

In last night's and this morning's back-to-back GOP debates, it was apparent that Texas Governor Rick Perry is no longer a serious candidate for president, polling at only 5% in South Carolina and 1% in New Hampshire (tied with Buddy Roemer). Reflecting his increasing irrelevance in the race, Perry received only a small fraction of the speaking time, and the things he did say were not taken very seriously (despite a controversial statement about Iraq). My favorite line of his, though, was from last night's debate:

"We're going to see Iran, in my opinion, move back in [to Iraq] at literally the speed of light."

This line attracted a fair amount of ridicule on Twitter and the blogosphere for, of course, misusing the word "literally." It would be very difficult for Iran to send troops into Iraq that are traveling 300 million meters per second.

This use of "literally"—as an intensifier, much like you would use "absolutely" or "extremely"—is becoming more and more common. Vice President Joe Biden is a fan; The Fix blogger Chris Cillizza was also a recent transgressor. There's now a blog devoted to its particularly humorous misusages. Primarily, though, you'll hear it in conversation, especially (in my experience) among young people (compare to "like, totally"). The frequency of this misapplication seems like it has spiked in the past five years or so, and it gives traditionalist grammarians fits.

The problem is—as with many linguists' favorite misusages to gripe about—"literally" is not the latest example of how the internet age is deteriorating our language; it has been misused in this way for at least 200 years. In 1769, Frances Brooke wrote in The History of Emily Montague, "He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies." The famous Mark Twain was also an offender in Tom Sawyer: "And when the middle of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth." Rick Perry's comment from last night was only the latest example of this fine literary tradition. Moreover, of course, Perry was merely employing a speech pattern that most of us have slipped into in the past—myself included. Considering that usage drives grammar, it's not a stretch to say that "virtually" or "utterly" has become one of "literally's" accepted definitions. Here in the year 2012, I don't think it's fair to condemn Perry for jumping on the bandwagon.

That said, I do wish "literally" were used with more care, for the sole reason that, once it is (mis)appropriated for that purpose, there will be no word left to mean "literally"! If you think about it, the words "really," "truly," and "actually" underwent similar transformations; if someone is "actually about to die laughing," that is not meant in the "actual" sense. Yet we hear this just as often as "literally," and it's probably more accepted—because we always had "literally" to fall back on when we meant that someone was literally dying from laughing too hard. Now there is no universally agreed-upon word to denote this; we will probably end up continuing to use "literally," which could create some unfortunate confusion considering its two possible (and practically opposite) meanings.

So here's your daily Baseballot public service announcement: the next time you're tempted to use the word "literally," think twice about whether you literally mean "literally." It could be the difference between life or death.

Mr. Butler, Mr. Butler, and the Future of Derby, Connecticut

A curious news item from Connecticut came to my attention recently. While the off-year 2011 elections were just a warm-up for 2012 for most of the country, for the Butler family of Derby, Connecticut, they were quite eventful indeed. James R. Butler, a Democrat serving on the town's Board of Apportionment and Taxation, was running for reelection, but when he walked into the voting booth he noticed something unusual: he was listed on the ballot as James J. Butler, which just so happens to be the name of his son. It would have been an innocuous typo anywhere else, but on a ballot, it was legally binding. As a result, the son, not the father, was declared the winner of the election. Not without controversy, he was sworn in on December 3, despite uncertainty over whether he would stay on or yield the seat to his father.

How to interpret the 1,526 ballots cast for James Butler is the political and legal equivalent of the age-old debate between grammatical prescriptivism and descriptivism. Proponents of the latter believe that a phrase like "I could care less" is correct if enough people accept it as such; therefore, if voters believed they were electing James R. Butler, then he should be elected irregardless. Prescriptivists, however, would say that the only ironclad application of the law is to seat the man whose full name was checked off—and, by the way, there's no such thing as a chaise lounge. (It's a chaise longue.)

I tend to take the prescriptivist view, so I'm sympathetic to the argument that, with such ambiguity present, obeying the letter of the law is the safest course. But being a prescriptivist often means two things: having a rigid grammatical philosophy and examining all questions on the most micro scale. However, the law (and grammar, I readily admit) requires consideration of the context and substance surrounding every nitpicking question. In the Butlers' case, even the most die-hard prescriptivist taking a broad view of the matter must see the serious legal, even constitutional problems with declaring James J. the winner. No matter what the ballot actually said, we have to use common sense about voters' intent, which almost certainly was to reelect the elder Butler. For better or for worse, most voters that day probably did not know what "their" James Butler's middle initial was—and if they did, most people probably didn't spot the typo. More troubling is that the candidate declared the victor (the younger Butler) was placed on the ballot improperly, maybe even illegally, evicting from the ballot the rightful Democratic nominee, his father. The son should never have been in a position to be sworn in in the first place!

At the same time, the name on the ballot still matters, and I don't think you can swear in James R. either. In Derby, we essentially have a situation where an ineligible candidate was nevertheless legally elected. But in order to assume a political office, you really need to do two things: get elected to it AND qualify for it. In this case—similar to if a 24-year-old won the presidency of the United States—no candidate has satisfied both requirements, and so the office should remain vacant. Then, as soon as practicable, the position should be filled through whatever means normally fill a vacancy (e.g., death or resignation) for that office.

Dubiously, Derby didn't take that seemingly sensible path. Instead, the younger Butler essentially staged a mini coup d'état of the Derby Board of Apportionment and Taxation. (Yes, that's a provocative term to use, but, strictly speaking, it's pretty accurate.) If there were to be an identical error on a larger stage (e.g., on a presidential ballot in a swing state), it would be a full-blown constitutional crisis; there isn't enough money in the world to pay all the lawyers' fees that would result. Additionally, the fact that James J. was sworn in even after the mistake was exposed makes it hypothetically possible for future ballot-printers to purposefully tamper with elections and affect their outcomes, at least if they feel like being an evil genius that day.

Really, what kept this from being a far nastier affair was the fact that the two "candidates" involved were father and son. Given the drama, there's an eerie lack of animosity apparent in interviews with the Butlers. At his son's swearing-in ceremony, James R. Butler sat in the front row, saying afterward, "If he wants it, it's his" and—betraying no interest in putting up a fight for a position he wanted badly enough to run for office to get—"It's my son's decision now on what he wants to do." As late as December 5 (almost a month after Election Day), James R. told reporters that father and son hadn't even talked about the issue yet. And rather than having the issue decided in court, the Butlers said they would discuss it as a family over dinner. (Eventually, James J. did resign and James R. was appointed to the seat via Derby's regular vacancy procedure—the elder Butler even earned a promotion to board chairman.)

I can't decide if this is dangerous or noble. On one hand, it doesn't matter how small your scale is—legal concepts are the same. There is no minimum threshold beyond which they can be ignored. While acrimony is never desirable, a legal dispute should be settled in a legal setting; especially when the legal concepts are this stark and the consequences this weighty, it's important that an appropriate and well-founded precedent be set. On the other hand, this self-settling controversy seems a reminder of a simpler time embodied by small towns like Derby. In hamlets where everyone still knows their neighbor, business can occur on an intimate basis, and compromises are easier to reach because they are personal and forged among friends. Where on a larger scale accusations of power-grabbing and corruption would fly, no one in this tiny town thought the Butlers were trying to install an unelected monarchy, despite the presence of all the legal loopholes discussed above. Even with such big concepts at play, this was an innocent mistake; who can blame the town for saying, "We're all responsible adults here—ethical, law-abiding citizens who trust each other and know that this is just a weird accident with our Board of Apportionment and Taxation. Surely we can come to a consensus solution and agree that it doesn't mean anything beyond who gets to crunch numbers for a couple years for a town whose budget isn't worth a fortune anyway." Why overcomplicate things? Would that all politics be so simple.

The addendum to that would be that the cause of all this was something equally simple. Somewhere, someone misprinted a single letter. That's all. If a rural Connecticuter sitting in a drab town-hall office could touch off such a turmoil with one innocuous mistake, surely it can all be fixed, equally informally, without leaving the walls of that same town hall... right?

I'm not sure. And the only thing I take away from the Derby debacle for sure is this: if a constitutional crisis or the seminal debate over local control could arise from your work, be sure to double-check it for typos.