Noah Webster and the Bee; Nobody would be prouder of contestants at the National Spelling Bee than the Founding Father who made it possible.
Edelweiss!</br></br>The misspelling of this European alpine plant was all it took to run Ben Bernanke out of Washington, DC.</br></br>This departure was not the result of an error he made at the Federal Reserve. It happened in a final round of the Scripps National Spelling Bee in 1964, when he was 11 years old. The Federal Reserve chairman will no doubt reflect on this tonight, as millions of Americans tune in at 8:00 p.m. to watch the spelling bee finals on ABC.</br></br>The first national spelling bee was held in 1925, and this year's competition will feature 273 spellers from the U.S. and around the world. Interestingly, English is not even the first language of 21 of those spellers, and Scripps reports that 102 of the contestants speak other languages, from Hebrew to Hindi.</br></br>Given this amazing diversity united under one language, the author of America's first dictionary and the originator of uniform spelling in America (which makes the Bee possible!) would be proud. That's Noah Webster, to whom the Bee owes its official dictionary, "Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary."