Spelling on the curve

After watching some of the Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee yesterday on ESPN, I have a suggestion. To even things out a little bit, maybe we need to spell on the curve.

All the kids with Asian and Indian ancestry should only be given words with a 14-letter minimum. Everyone else gets a nice easy one-syllable word.

I asked my colleague Danh Hoang about my idea and he was pretty cool with it. And I define "pretty cool" as Danh didn't call me a racist twit.

For example, Nandu Shivashankar, 13, whose hobbies include translating Shakespeare plays into Latin, stem cell research and cloning her pets, would get a word like "hydrometalurgy."

And Fred, 12, from Louisiana, whose hobbies include throwing firecrackers at his sister and listening to heavy metal music from the 1980s, would get a word like "hi."

Just a thought.