Countywide : It’s as Easy as Spelling <i> Superficies</i>

John Yun was bombarded Tuesday night with words like hamotzi, but it was the word superficies that propelled him to victory in a countywide spelling competition for junior high school students.

Yun, a seventh-grader at the Douglas MacArthur Middle School in Santa Ana, studied for months to prepare for the Orange County Spelling Competition. He advances to the national spelling bee championship in Washington on May 27.

Yun came to the United States from Korea nine years ago and said he learned English by watching television. He attributed his success to “studying real hard and being committed.”

The runner-up was Scott Peterson, a 13-year-old spelling bee veteran from Cerro Villa Middle School in Villa Park. Forty-two children from throughout the county competed in the contest, which was held in Costa Mesa.

Tuesday’s competition had two parts, a written exam followed by a traditional spelling bee in which students had to spell the words outloud.

The contestants busily studied until the contest began--jotting notes, shuffling index cards and quizzing one another until the last possible moment.

“This is not really fun,” said Eric Kim, 14, a seventh-grader at Walker Junior High School in La Palma. “I guess I like the challenge. Sometimes, it seems like a waste of time.”

Most students said they spent only a few hours preparing for the competition. Peterson and a classmate--Joe Mullin, 13, of Orange--said they studied for about three hours, mostly on the advanced words listed in a spelling bee vocabulary pamphlet.

“It’s important not to overcomplicate the words, especially at the beginning,” Peterson said, remembering one girl who lost a contest last year by spelling blot b-l-o-u-g-h-t. “The final round is where you get the complex words.”

Mullin said most of the words used in the bee are rarely seen “in real life. Like cleavability-- c’mon, who uses that?”

Because the students don’t have to know the definitions of the words, they sometimes have fun imagining them.

“Watch out, or I’ll oologize your kilster,” Mullin joked. “I don’t know what that means at all.”

Every student at the bee had war stories to swap. Peterson, for example, remembered the time he misspelled skedaddle. But his friend Mullin added, “That was a cheap shot, because it was slang. Those are the ones that really tick me off.”