It’s now official, Anamika Veeramani, a 14-year-old from North Royalton, Ohio has won this year’s National Spelling Bee. The winning word was Stromuhr, a medical instrument designed to measure the amount and speed of blood flow through an artery.
Anamika became the third Indian-American winner in a row. Indian-Americans comprise less than 1 percent of the U.S. population according to 2000 census data, but they have an impressive bee winning streak — taking the trophy in eight of the past 12 years.
The Indian-American winning streak began with Nupur Lala, a 2007 graduate of the University of Michigan, who became famous for her 1999 win after the 2002 release of the Academy Award-nominated documentary "Spellbound."
By then, George Abraham Thampy had won in 2000. Pratyush Buddiga took the title two years later. The streak continued through the decade: Sai Gunturi won in 2003, Anurag Kashyap in 2005, Sameer Mishra in 2008 and Kavya Shivashankar in 2009. Kavya, now 14, returned this year to watch her sister Vanya, 8, compete in her first national bee.
After Kavya congratulated Anamika onstage, she said winning the bee has less to do with nationality and more to do with a passion for words.
"I can't really speak for other people, but, for me, it was just enjoying spelling."
I find the whole hyphenated-American thing disturbing, but I personally think these kids come to spelling with an advantage: They had to start out learning to spell their own names, and Anamika or Pratyush is a lot more challenging than Mary or Tom.
Advantage or not, spelling is a challenge. To illustrate the point, Bernard Shaw once proposed the correct spelling of “fish” was “GHOTI” with the [gh] from "laugh", the [o] from "women" and the [ti] from "nation".
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