Wordsmith

When the Rio Grande Valley Regional Spelling Bee is held this year, a 22-year tradition will have ended.
Marty Lewis, the official pronouncer and voice of the spelling bee, is retiring.
The 65-year-old Lewis, an English professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College, also is retiring from teaching, a decision about which Lewis said he has mixed emotions.
“I’ll be glad to do more writing,” he said, “because teaching logic and critical thinking really kind of saps the creativity, at least out of me.”
He also said he’s glad he will be able to read books that he doesn’t have to teach.
“I’ll miss the students,” he said. “I’ve told people before that I would almost teach for nothing if I didn’t have to grade papers.”
As for the spelling bee, he has enjoyed watching the participating students’ intensity, as well as that of their sponsors, coaches, teachers and parents.
This year’s spelling bee will be Saturday, with 54 students from the area’s four counties – Cameron, Willacy, Hidalgo and Starr, attempting to spell some of the most difficult words in the English language.
The winner of the regional event will travel to Washington, D.C., to represent the Valley and Freedom Newspapers, one of the event’s sponsors, in the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Lewis was absent from the spelling bee only once in the past 22 years, when he was called on to read some of his poetry at a conference.
During his time as the regional bee’s pronouncer, he said, he has admired the participants’ cool.
“I really enjoyed the fact that most of them didn’t get all tense,” he said. “Some of them were … almost nonchalant. If they misspelled a word, it was, ‘Well, that’s just the way it goes.’ And I’m not saying that they didn’t prepare hard or they weren’t invested, but they saw it for what it was, even though there was a considerable award for winning. So, I was pleased with their sporting attitude.”
It is important that the winner is given a chance to see the world outside the Valley, he said, specifically, Washington, D.C.
“It is a fine hotel, the accommodations are great, and I guess they had almost a whole week there,” he said. “.. Some of those winners maybe had never been out of Brownsville, never been on an airplane. So I was pleased to see when they could win.”
Lewis himself had to do a lot of work to prepare for the spelling bee.
“I got the words in advance and, essentially, I’d go through them and decide which ones I just didn’t want to tackle under pressure,” he said. “And I just kept practicing and practicing, making marks about pronunciation. I’d make marks, and I’d practice, did some research on how to minimize my Central Texas twang.”
Lewis said a pronouncer’s guide gives the definition of each word, its origin, and a sentence. The most difficult part of the job came when there were multiple pronunciations. He has seen as many as five different pronunciations for one word.
Such specifics for each word taught students to engage in what Lewis calls “word attack.” They would ask for a definition for a word, like “aural” (having to do with the ear), which sounds much like the word “oral” (Having to do with the mouth).
In addition to audio clues, participants can get a clue about a word’s spelling by asking its language origin.
One of the benefits of studying for and participating in a bee is that students also get a sense of how language works. Through word attack, he said, they learn how much the English language borrows from other languages. Although English is primarily a Germanic tongue, it is filled with words derived from Latin and Greek and other languages.
“It’s what an old teacher of mine used to call transfer of training,” he said. “We would say, ‘Why do we have to learn Latin?’ In the particular school I went to, Latin was required. He said the discipline of learning another language would carry over into other disciplines.”