Can you spell ‘drama’?

Those Jersey girls are tough. Especially when it comes to spelling. That might explain why 13-year-old Kerry Close of Spring Lake, New Jersey won it all at the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. Thursday night, beating out 274 other super-spellers from around the country. Kerry, a.k.a. Speller 147, was the big winner this year, but if any of these kids challenges you to a spelling contest, don’t do it. They will work you over like a speed bag with diphthongs, foreign derivatives and words like “logorrhea” -- a stomach ailment common to mathematicians. That’s not true. I made that up. It means to repeat something over and over or to talk incessantly. Logorrhea was the winning word in 1999 by the way. I’m crazy about the National Spelling Bee, which is odd, considering my personal and tragic history with it, which I will not bore you with again although I am traumatized by it to this day and will carry the scars of that experience forever.

On Thursday night, when the moderator went into his wind up and hurled a 98 mile-an-hour fastball of a word at the pride of Spring Lake, New Jersey, Kerry Close swung as hard as she could and ripped it, deep, deep, deep, to the track, to the wall -- back, back, back -- gone! The packed house exploded and the fans went bonkers as Kerry staggered back from the microphone in shock and covered her mouth with both hands. The winning word? “Ursprache.” Could you have spelled it? Me neither. Do you know what it means? Neither do I. But by spelling it, young miss Close pulled down $32,500 in cash, $5,000 in scholarship money, and the only prize that mattered to her, a stunning trophy engraved with the words “Katherine ‘Kerry’ Close -- 2006 Scripps National Spelling Bee Champion.”

It was a moment witnessed by millions across the country by the way because for the first time ever, the National Spelling Bee finals aired live on national television, on ABC, in primetime no less. Finally, some reality television that’s worth watching! Ratings wise, the big bee turned in a very respectable primetime showing, finishing behind CBS and their mega-series, “CSI”, but beating out FOX and NBC. Add to that the recent spelling bee movies “Bee Season” and “Akeelah and the Bee” and the wildly popular documentary “Spellbound” -- could it be that spelling is finally getting its due? Sure hope so.

I am constantly stunned, shocked and on occasion flabbergasted and flummoxed by the amount of misspelling and incorrect usage you see these days, and I’m not talking about from the mouths of babes. I’m talking about from the media, in business correspondence, and from people who should know much, much better. All the power dressing and corner offices in the world cannot save a senior vice president who cannot spell from looking like a moron. Very few of us can keep up with the whiz kids who gather in Washington every year, but the renewed interest in spelling and spelling bees is encouraging. And as I’ve warned you time and time again, “spell check” is a cancer across the land, and you better not be depending on spell Czech to tell ewe the write whey to spell a word oar rite a sentence.

Aside from Kerry’s triumph, the other dramatic moment on Thursday night had a local connection, assuming you consider Poway near San Diego local. Saryn Hooks is a pretty 12-year-old from Taylorsville, N.C., which in case you’re wondering, is just east of Ellendale and west of Hiddenite. Saryn was cruising along quite nicely until she was asked to spell “hechsher” ? a German word that means an obnoxious drunk in a comedy club. That’s a lie. It means a rabbinical endorsement or certification. Saryn got it wrong, heard the dreaded bell toll and dutifully took her seat. But a young man from Poway, Lucas Brown, sitting in the audience with a laptop computer, couldn’t believe what his laptop was telling him. Lucas Brown’s sister, Julia, was also a contestant and Lucas, like many family members, was there to keep an eye out for any variable spellings that might influence a judge’s ruling. The moderator had told Saryn the correct spelling was “hechscher,” but the cyber-dictionary on Lucas’ laptop spelled Saryn’s word exactly as she had ? hechsher ? and there was no variable spelling. If Lucas and his laptop were right, the judges were wrong! Lucas told his father, David Brown, who raced to the back of the room to tell the officials, who dropped their jaws when they determined that Lucas and his darned laptop were absolutely correct.

At this point, the problem was that the mega-bee’s rules clearly state that only a contestant’s parents can appeal a ruling on a contestant’s behalf, and there sat Saryn Hooks and her parents, consoling each other, on stage, on national TV, live. Someone finally got the Hooks’ attention and explained the problem in the softest of voices, at which point Saryn’s parents blew the whistle, threw down the flag and asked for a review of the play. Sure enough, after the next commercial break, an announcement was made that Saryn Hooks would be reinstated because she did not misspell her word, thank you, and that the judges were embarrassed, red-faced and would like to crawl in a hole, or words to that effect. Saryn ultimately finished in third place, just a few syllables short of spelling’s pearly gates. When a reporter from the San Diego Union-Tribune asked Lucas Brown if Saryn had thanked him, Lucas said, “Oh yeah, she said she owes me big-time!”

By the way, if you’re feeling bold, here are the 20 words that Kerry Close had to wrestle to the ground in the final round to go home with the whole chimichanga: Gobemouche; Galilean; chiragra; Bildungsroman; terrene; cucullate; synusia; towhee; Shedu; hukilau; clinamen; recrementitious; psittacism; aubade; kanone; izzat; tmesis; kundalini; ursprache. I can tell you what a couple of them mean -- “izzat” is a common interrogatory form; “kanone” is an Italian weapon -- but for the rest of them, you better call Lucas Brown. He knows this stuff. I gotta go.