The news that American schoolchildren have once again triumphed in the Scripps National Spelling Bee has sent the usual tremors through Britain’s chattering classes. Education chiefs, ever defensive, insist that our standards remain high, that we are merely playing a different game. But let us be honest with ourselves. The victor, a lad from Texas, spelled ‘apodyterium’ as if it were his mother tongue. Meanwhile, our own children struggle with ‘necessary’ and ‘accommodation’. Why? Because we have elevated emotional literacy above linguistic rigour, and called it progress.
Consider the historical arc. In the Victorian Era, spelling was a mark of civilisation, a tool for ordering the world. To misspell was to show moral laxity. Today, we have spellcheck, autocorrect, and a curriculum that prizes ‘self-expression’ over precision. The American spelling bee is a relic of that older world, a gladiatorial contest of memory and discipline. We, in our decadence, have abolished such contests, calling them ‘elitist’ or ‘stressful’. Instead, we encourage children to write poems about their feelings, and call it English.
But the deeper rot is intellectual. The American children succeed because their culture still values a certain kind of mental athleticism. Ours values therapy. We have become Rome in its decline: sophisticated, sensitive, and utterly unable to defend its borders against barbarians who can spell ‘apodyterium’. The empire of the English language is shifting west, and we are the ones left trying to recall what that word meant.
‘Apodyterium’, by the way, is a changing room in a Roman bathhouse. The irony is delicious. We cannot spell the word for a room where Romans prepared for the bath, while Americans can. It is as if the ghosts of the ancients are laughing at our pretensions. Our education chiefs talk of ‘context’ and ‘creativity’, but the truth is simpler: we have abandoned the basics, and the basics have abandoned us.
What is to be done? Return to rote learning? Revive the spelling bee as a national sport? Perhaps. But recall that the fall of Rome was not reversed by a single policy. It was a slow decay, a loss of confidence in traditional forms. And so it is with us. We no longer believe that a word has a correct spelling. We think language is fluid, a tool of identity rather than a tool of communication. And so we lose, not just bees, but the ability to think clearly.
The Americans, for all their faults, understand that mastery of language is mastery of thought. They do not confuse kindness with sloppiness. They do not call ignorance ‘inclusion’. Until we recover that old Roman discipline, we will continue to lose. And worse: we will not even know what we have lost.
