The local Literacy Council runs a spelling bee every year as their one fund-raiser. It's an adult spelling bee, and you bring teams of three people from your organization. When your team is up, you have pen and paper, you all scribble down and confer real quick, and then someone takes the mic and spells it however the team agrees. (You don't get much time to discuss.) I work at the public library, and we apparently send a team each year. So yeah, weird format, and weird enough that I'm in an adult spelling bee.
Not that I'm without credentials here. I did win my school spelling bee in 8th grade and nearly win the regional. Had I spelled nephelometer correctly, I'd probably have gone to nationals. Of course, that was also 15 years ago, and my speling and grammer hav declind considerbly thanx to tha intrenet.
They started off mostly easy. We got BROCADE at first. A couple teams did get nasty words early (INDICIA??), but it came around a second time with FEDORA, and ironically I'm going as Indiana Jones for Halloween. It gets to near the end of the second rotation, and a team gets a word...this is the phonetic version -- gee-OGG-nuh-see. It means the study of something'er'nother related to the earth. The team gets it wrong. They go to the next team with the same word. They get it wrong. The team before us gets it wrong. We're sweating it, try something odd, and it's wrong. And sure enough, it goes all the way around the freaking stage with nobody getting it right. Yay, everyone's back in!
We get a few more words right, (DIOCESE and YEOMANRY -- seriously? Yeomanry?) before we get ferr-row...as in an ancient Egyptian ruler. I write down PHARAOH. My teammates both write down PHAROAH. I don't think that's write, they aren't sure but are leaning on one another's gut instinct, so begrudgingly I take the mic (since I'm the team speaker) and do it their way. *buzzer*
Of course, I had it right. I can't get too mad at my team though, since I would have never gotten yeomanry.
Oh, and the word everyone missed? GEOGNOSY.
It almost happened again later with ZEITGEBER. The winning team got SOLATIUM and LOXOCOSM to clinch.
And no, I have no idea why you should care. You probably shouldn't. I just wanted to complain about losing on a dumb word I knew. (And so you could laugh at me for being in a spelling bee.)