Tag: language

With vocabulary more important than ever, National Spelling Bee requires different prep

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OXON HILL, Md. — Navneeth Murali would strongly prefer for the Scripps National Spelling Bee to get rid of the onstage, multiple-choice vocabulary questions that were introduced to the competition two years ago.

“It’s sort of hit or miss, the onstage vocab format, and it’s sort of brutal in my opinion,” the 17-year-old former speller said.

The vocabulary questions are part of a series of changes to the post-pandemic bee, which is leaner and, in some ways, meaner. Accomplished spellers can be bounced from the bee without ever misspelling a word. And because there is no alternative path to the bee as there was in the late 2010s, the regional bees spellers must win to qualify can be incredibly tense, and sometimes shocking. Last year’s national runner-up, Vikram Raju, didn’t make it back in his final year of eligibility.

The tweaks help ensure the bee, which began Tuesday with the preliminary rounds and concludes Thursday, finishes on schedule with a sole champion. That’s an important consideration after the eight-way tie of 2019. But some in the spelling community say they make the competition more dependent on luck and less about rewarding spellers for their years spent mastering roots and language patterns and exploring the farthest reaches of Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged dictionary.

During their initial appearances onstage Tuesday at a convention center outside Washington, spellers were asked to spell one word and define another, both from a list provided in advance. Of the 229 spellers, 57 were ousted for misspelling (24.9%), while 33 of the 172 who spelled their first word correctly (19.2%) got vocabulary answers wrong.

“Scripps has done a good job of evolving and not staying fixed in place, even if some of the particular choices they make, I would not myself have made if I were in their shoes,” said Scott Remer, a former speller, study guide author and coach who is tutoring 29 competitors in this year’s bee.

Navneeth, a high school junior from Edison, New Jersey, had his last, best chance to win a national title wiped out by the pandemic in 2020, and he has since poured his energy into coaching. Along with another ex-speller-turned-guru, Grace Walters, he mentored last year’s champion, Harini Logan.

The way Navneeth sees it, the SAT-style vocabulary questions are here to stay, and there’s no excuse for spellers not to be prepared.

“Last year, I did miss on a vocabulary word, and it felt like it was the type of vocabulary word I should have known,” said 13-year-old Shradha Rachamreddy of San Jose, California, one of Navneeth’s pupils. “They’re not obscure. It’s a mix of general knowledge and specific speller knowledge.”

During Navneeth’s time as a speller, vocabulary was only part of a written test that also included spelling. It was important — the test score determined who made the semifinals — but the stakes weren’t as high. Spellers could get a few definitions wrong and still make it through.

Now, vocabulary rounds are sprinkled through the onstage competition, and if a speller gets one multiple-choice question wrong, they’re out. Yet Navneeth still observes spellers treating vocabulary as an afterthought in their preparation. His students have been working on it for a full year, and he also wrote a book, “Defining Success,” intended to help spellers prepare for the vocabulary portion.

“Since the stakes are much higher, it’s not something you can wing,” Navneeth said. “It’s something that you need to prepare for and practice and get used to. Because I’ve placed an emphasis on it from the beginning of the next season, I feel that it’s something my students are primed for.”

SURPRISING ABSENCE

Vikram, last year’s runner-up, took eventual champion Harini all the way to a “spell-off” — Scripps’ term for its lightning-round tiebreaker. He looked forward to returning this year as an eighth-grader, the last school year in which spellers are eligible.

Instead, Vikram was bounced in his regional bee in Denver, which lasted 53 rounds over a span of more than five hours. Vikram and his parents argued that he misspelled because the bee’s pronouncer made one of several mistakes, but their appeal was unsuccessful.

“The bee went so deep off-list, there were several words that Vikram had to actually anticipate what the word might be based on the language or the definition,” said his mother, Sandhya Ayyar. “After these several rounds, he reached a point where, ‘I don’t know what’s the word or what I’m supposed to spell here.’”

In 2018 or 2019, Vikram still could have gone to nationals, because Scripps had a wild-card program meant to ensure that spellers from highly competitive regions had a chance to compete on the biggest stage. However, the program was open to spellers of widely varying abilities as long as their families were able to pay their way, and the 2019 bee swelled to more than 500 competitors, some of whom clearly didn’t belong.

Scripps had planned to curtail the wild cards in 2020, making them available only to eighth-graders like Vikram who had previously competed at nationals. But that bee was canceled because of the pandemic, and in 2021, Scripps got rid of the wild cards altogether. Ayyar’s request to Scripps to bring them back this year was rebuffed.

Corrie Loeffler, the bee’s executive director, wouldn’t rule out creating a new qualifying system in the future, but she declined to change this year’s competition rules retroactively.

“We heard from a handful of people, and it’s a tough thing,” Loeffler said. “You’re talking about kids who have worked really hard and want the opportunity to show off what they’ve worked for, and that’s something we don’t take lightly, but we also take the rules of our competition very seriously.

“I feel for Vikram very strongly, especially as a former speller. I told his parents that; I told him that. He has so much to be proud of. That spell-off from last year, nobody is going to forget that.”

UNAVOIDABLE ABSENCE

The bee began with television host Paul Loeffler — Corrie’s brother — sending well wishes to 12-year-old Lance Sanchez of Guam, who was unable to travel to Washington to compete because the U.S. territory’s airport was closed by Typhoon Mawar. Lance is a sixth-grader and has two years of eligibility remaining.

___

Ben Nuckols has covered the Scripps National Spelling Bee since 2012. Follow him at https://twitter.com/APBenNuckols

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May 31, 2023
Exclusive secrets of the National Spelling Bee: Picking the words to identify a champion

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OXON HILL, Md. — As the final pre-competition meeting of the Scripps National Spelling Bee’s word selection panel stretches into its seventh hour, the pronouncers no longer seem to care.

Before panelists can debate the words picked for the bee, they need to hear each word and its language of origin, part of speech, definition and exemplary sentence read aloud. Late in the meeting, lead pronouncer Jacques Bailly and his colleagues — so measured in their pacing and meticulous in their enunciation during the bee — rip through that chore as quickly as possible. No pauses. No apologies for flubs.

By the time of this gathering, two days before the bee, the word list is all but complete. Each word has been vetted by the panel and slotted into the appropriate round of the nearly century-old annual competition to identify the English language’s best speller.

For decades, the word panel’s work has been a closely guarded secret. This year, Scripps — a Cincinnati-based media company — granted The Associated Press exclusive access to the panelists and their pre-bee meeting, with the stipulation that The AP would not reveal words unless they were cut from the list.

THEY’RE TOUGH ON WORDS

The 21 panelists sit around a makeshift, rectangular conference table in a windowless room tucked inside the convention center outside Washington where the bee is staged every year. They are given printouts including words Nos. 770-1,110 — those used in the semifinal rounds and beyond — with instructions that those sheets of paper cannot leave the room.

Hearing the words aloud with the entire panel present — laptops open to Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged dictionary — sometimes illuminates problems. That’s what happened late in Sunday’s meeting. Kavya Shivashankar, the 2009 champion, an obstetrician/gynecologist and a recent addition to the panel, chimed in with an objection.

The word gleyde (pronounced “glide”), which means a decrepit old horse and is only used in Britain, has a near-homonym — glyde — with a similar but not identical pronunciation and the same meaning. Shivashankar says the variant spelling makes the word too confusing, and the rest of the panel quickly agrees to spike gleyde altogether. It won’t be used.

“Nice word, but bye-bye,” pronouncer Kevin Moch says.

For the panelists, the meeting is the culmination of a yearlong process to assemble a word list that will challenge but not embarrass the 230 middle- and elementary-school-aged competitors — and preferably produce a champion within the two-hour broadcast window for Thursday night’s finals.

The panel’s work has changed over the decades. From 1961 to 1984, according to James Maguire’s book “American Bee,” creating the list was a one-man operation overseen by Jim Wagner, a Scripps Howard editorial promotions director, and then by Harvey Elentuck, a then-MIT student who approached Wagner about helping with the list in the mid-1970s.

The panel was created in 1985. The current collaborative approach didn’t take shape until the early ’90s. Bailly, the 1980 champion, joined in 1991.

“Harvey … made the whole list,” Bailly says. “I never met him. I was just told, ‘You’re the new Harvey.’”

IT’S NOT JUST PICKING WORDS

This year’s meeting includes five full-time bee staffers and 16 contract panelists. The positions are filled via word of mouth within the spelling community or recommendations from panelists. The group includes five former champions: Barrie Trinkle (1973), Bailly, George Thampy (2000), Sameer Mishra (2008) and Shivashankar.

Trinkle, who joined the panel in 1997, used to produce the majority of her submissions by reading periodicals like The New Yorker or The Economist.

“Our raison d’etre was to teach spellers a rich vocabulary that they could use in their daily lives. And as they got smarter and smarter, they got more in contact with each other and were studying off the same lists, it became harder to hold a bee with those same types of words,” Trinkle says.

Now, more often than not she goes directly to the source — Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged. That’s easier than it used to be.

“The dictionary is on the computer and is highly searchable in all kinds of ways — which the spellers know as well. If they want to find all the words that entered the language in the 1650s, they can do that, which is sometimes what I do,” Trinkle says. “The best words kind of happen to you as you’re scrolling around through the dictionary.”

Not everyone on the panel submits words. Some work to ensure that the definitions, parts of speech and other accompanying information are correct; others are tasked with ensuring that words of similar difficulty are asked at the right times in the competition; others focus on crafting the bee’s new multiple-choice vocabulary questions. Those who submit words, like Trinkle and Mishra, are given assignments throughout the year to come up with a certain number at a certain level of difficulty.

Mishra pulls his submissions from his own list, which he started when he was a 13-year-old speller. He gravitates toward “the harder end of the spectrum.”

“They are fun and challenging for me and they make me smile, and I know if I was a speller I would be intimidated by that word,” says the 28-year-old Mishra, who just finished his MBA at Harvard. “I have no fear about running out (of words), and I feel good about that.”

HOW THE BEE HAS EVOLVED

The panel meets a few times a year, often virtually, to go over words, edit definitions and sentences, and weed out problems. The process seemed to go smoothly through the 2010s, even amid a proliferation of so-called “minor league” bees, many catering to offspring of highly educated, first-generation Indian immigrants — a group that has come to dominate the competition.

In 2019, a confluence of factors — among them, a wild-card program that allowed multiple spellers from competitive regions to reach nationals — produced an unusually deep field of spellers. Scripps had to use the toughest words on its list just to cull to a dozen finalists. The bee ended in an eight-way tie, and there was no shortage of critics.

Scripps, however, didn’t fundamentally change the way the word panel operates. It brought in younger panelists more attuned to the ways contemporary spellers study and prepare. And it made format changes designed to identify a sole champion. The wild-card program was scrapped, and Scripps added onstage vocabulary questions and a lightning-round tiebreaker.

The panel also began pulling words avoided in the past. Place names, trademarks, words with no language of origin: As long as a word isn’t archaic or obsolete, it’s fair game.

“They’ve started to understand they have to push further into the dictionary,” says Shourav Dasari, a 20-year-old former speller and a co-founder with his older sister Shobha of SpellPundit, which sells study guides and hosts a popular online bee. “Last year, we started seeing stuff like tribal names that are some of the hardest words in the dictionary.”

THERE’S A METICULOUSNESS TO IT ALL

Members of the panel insist they worry little about other bees or the proliferation of study materials and private coaches. But those coaches and entrepreneurs spend a lot of time thinking about the words Scripps is likely to use — often quite successfully.

Dasari says there are roughly 100,000 words in the dictionary that are appropriate for spelling bees. He pledges that 99% of the words on Scripps’ list are included in SpellPundit’s materials. Anyone who learns all those words is all but guaranteed to win, Dasari says — but no one has shown they can do it.

“I just don’t know when anybody would be able to completely master the unabridged dictionary,” Dasari says.

Since the bee resumed after its 2020 pandemic cancellation, the panel has been scrutinized largely for the vocabulary questions, which have added a capricious element, knocking out some of the most gifted spellers even if they don’t misspell a word. Last year’s champion, Harini Logan, was briefly ousted on a vocabulary word, “pullulation” — only to be reinstated minutes later after arguing that her answer could be construed as correct.

“That gave us a sense of how very, very careful we need to be in terms of crafting these questions,” says Ben Zimmer, the language columnist for The Wall Street Journal and a chief contributor of words for the vocabulary rounds.

Zimmer is also sensitive to the criticism that some vocabulary questions are evaluating the spellers’ cultural sophistication rather than their mastery of roots and language patterns. This year’s vocabulary questions contain more clues that will guide gifted spellers to the answers, he says.

There will always be complaints about the word list, but making the competition as fair as possible is the panel’s chief goal. Missing hyphens or incorrect capitalization, ambiguities about singular and plural nouns or transitive and intransitive verbs — no question is too insignificant.

“This is really problematic,” Trinkle says, pointing out a word that has a homonym with a similar definition.

Scripps editorial manager Maggie Lorenz agrees: “We’re going to bump that word entirely.”

___

Ben Nuckols has covered the Scripps National Spelling Bee since 2012. Follow him at https://twitter.com/APBenNuckols

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May 29, 2023
Exclusive secrets of the National Spelling Bee: Picking the words to identify a champion

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OXON HILL, Md. — As the final pre-competition meeting of the Scripps National Spelling Bee’s word selection panel stretches into its seventh hour, the pronouncers no longer seem to care.

Before panelists can debate the words picked for the bee, they need to hear each word and its language of origin, part of speech, definition and exemplary sentence read aloud. Late in the meeting, lead pronouncer Jacques Bailly and his colleagues — so measured in their pacing and meticulous in their enunciation during the bee — rip through that chore as quickly as possible. No pauses. No apologies for flubs.

By the time of this gathering, two days before the bee, the word list is all but complete. Each word has been vetted by the panel and slotted into the appropriate round of the nearly century-old annual competition to identify the English language’s best speller.

For decades, the word panel’s work has been a closely guarded secret. This year, Scripps — a Cincinnati-based media company — granted The Associated Press exclusive access to the panelists and their pre-bee meeting, with the stipulation that The AP would not reveal words unless they were cut from the list.

THEY’RE TOUGH ON WORDS

The 21 panelists sit around a makeshift, rectangular conference table in a windowless room tucked inside the convention center outside Washington where the bee is staged every year. They are given printouts including words Nos. 770-1,110 — those used in the semifinal rounds and beyond — with instructions that those sheets of paper cannot leave the room.

Hearing the words aloud with the entire panel present — laptops open to Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged dictionary — sometimes illuminates problems. That’s what happened late in Sunday’s meeting. Kavya Shivashankar, the 2009 champion, an obstetrician/gynecologist and a recent addition to the panel, chimed in with an objection.

The word gleyde (pronounced “glide”), which means a decrepit old horse and is only used in Britain, has a near-homonym — glyde — with a similar but not identical pronunciation and the same meaning. Shivashankar says the variant spelling makes the word too confusing, and the rest of the panel quickly agrees to spike gleyde altogether. It won’t be used.

“Nice word, but bye-bye,” pronouncer Kevin Moch says.

For the panelists, the meeting is the culmination of a yearlong process to assemble a word list that will challenge but not embarrass the 230 middle- and elementary-school-aged competitors — and preferably produce a champion within the two-hour broadcast window for Thursday night’s finals.

The panel’s work has changed over the decades. From 1961 to 1984, according to James Maguire’s book “American Bee,” creating the list was a one-man operation overseen by Jim Wagner, a Scripps Howard editorial promotions director, and then by Harvey Elentuck, a then-MIT student who approached Wagner about helping with the list in the mid-1970s.

The panel was created in 1985. The current collaborative approach didn’t take shape until the early ’90s. Bailly, the 1980 champion, joined in 1991.

“Harvey … made the whole list,” Bailly says. “I never met him. I was just told, ‘You’re the new Harvey.’”

IT’S NOT JUST PICKING WORDS

This year’s meeting includes five full-time bee staffers and 16 contract panelists. The positions are filled via word of mouth within the spelling community or recommendations from panelists. The group includes five former champions: Barrie Trinkle (1973), Bailly, George Thampy (2000), Sameer Mishra (2008) and Shivashankar.

Trinkle, who joined the panel in 1997, used to produce the majority of her submissions by reading periodicals like The New Yorker or The Economist.

“Our raison d’etre was to teach spellers a rich vocabulary that they could use in their daily lives. And as they got smarter and smarter, they got more in contact with each other and were studying off the same lists, it became harder to hold a bee with those same types of words,” Trinkle says.

Now, more often than not she goes directly to the source — Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged. That’s easier than it used to be.

“The dictionary is on the computer and is highly searchable in all kinds of ways — which the spellers know as well. If they want to find all the words that entered the language in the 1650s, they can do that, which is sometimes what I do,” Trinkle says. “The best words kind of happen to you as you’re scrolling around through the dictionary.”

Not everyone on the panel submits words. Some work to ensure that the definitions, parts of speech and other accompanying information are correct; others are tasked with ensuring that words of similar difficulty are asked at the right times in the competition; others focus on crafting the bee’s new multiple-choice vocabulary questions. Those who submit words, like Trinkle and Mishra, are given assignments throughout the year to come up with a certain number at a certain level of difficulty.

Mishra pulls his submissions from his own list, which he started when he was a 13-year-old speller. He gravitates toward “the harder end of the spectrum.”

“They are fun and challenging for me and they make me smile, and I know if I was a speller I would be intimidated by that word,” says the 28-year-old Mishra, who just finished his MBA at Harvard. “I have no fear about running out (of words), and I feel good about that.”

HOW THE BEE HAS EVOLVED

The panel meets a few times a year, often virtually, to go over words, edit definitions and sentences, and weed out problems. The process seemed to go smoothly through the 2010s, even amid a proliferation of so-called “minor league” bees, many catering to offspring of highly educated, first-generation Indian immigrants — a group that has come to dominate the competition.

In 2019, a confluence of factors — among them, a wild-card program that allowed multiple spellers from competitive regions to reach nationals — produced an unusually deep field of spellers. Scripps had to use the toughest words on its list just to cull to a dozen finalists. The bee ended in an eight-way tie, and there was no shortage of critics.

Scripps, however, didn’t fundamentally change the way the word panel operates. It brought in younger panelists more attuned to the ways contemporary spellers study and prepare. And it made format changes designed to identify a sole champion. The wild-card program was scrapped, and Scripps added onstage vocabulary questions and a lightning-round tiebreaker.

The panel also began pulling words avoided in the past. Place names, trademarks, words with no language of origin: As long as a word isn’t archaic or obsolete, it’s fair game.

“They’ve started to understand they have to push further into the dictionary,” says Shourav Dasari, a 20-year-old former speller and a co-founder with his older sister Shobha of SpellPundit, which sells study guides and hosts a popular online bee. “Last year, we started seeing stuff like tribal names that are some of the hardest words in the dictionary.”

THERE’S A METICULOUSNESS TO IT ALL

Members of the panel insist they worry little about other bees or the proliferation of study materials and private coaches. But those coaches and entrepreneurs spend a lot of time thinking about the words Scripps is likely to use — often quite successfully.

Dasari says there are roughly 100,000 words in the dictionary that are appropriate for spelling bees. He pledges that 99% of the words on Scripps’ list are included in SpellPundit’s materials. Anyone who learns all those words is all but guaranteed to win, Dasari says — but no one has shown they can do it.

“I just don’t know when anybody would be able to completely master the unabridged dictionary,” Dasari says.

Since the bee resumed after its 2020 pandemic cancellation, the panel has been scrutinized largely for the vocabulary questions, which have added a capricious element, knocking out some of the most gifted spellers even if they don’t misspell a word. Last year’s champion, Harini Logan, was briefly ousted on a vocabulary word, “pullulation” — only to be reinstated minutes later after arguing that her answer could be construed as correct.

“That gave us a sense of how very, very careful we need to be in terms of crafting these questions,” says Ben Zimmer, the language columnist for The Wall Street Journal and a chief contributor of words for the vocabulary rounds.

Zimmer is also sensitive to the criticism that some vocabulary questions are evaluating the spellers’ cultural sophistication rather than their mastery of roots and language patterns. This year’s vocabulary questions contain more clues that will guide gifted spellers to the answers, he says.

There will always be complaints about the word list, but making the competition as fair as possible is the panel’s chief goal. Missing hyphens or incorrect capitalization, ambiguities about singular and plural nouns or transitive and intransitive verbs — no question is too insignificant.

“This is really problematic,” Trinkle says, pointing out a word that has a homonym with a similar definition.

Scripps editorial manager Maggie Lorenz agrees: “We’re going to bump that word entirely.”

___

Ben Nuckols has covered the Scripps National Spelling Bee since 2012. Follow him at https://twitter.com/APBenNuckols

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May 29, 2023
A’s broadcaster apologizes after apparent racial slur

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Oakland Athletics broadcaster Glen Kuiper has apologized after uttering what sounded like a racial slur while describing a trip to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Oakland Athletics broadcaster Glen Kuiper apologized after uttering what sounded like a racial slur while describing a trip to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.

In a pregame segment on NBC Sports California before the A’s played the Kansas City Royals on Friday night, Kuiper talked about a trip to the museum with colleague Dallas Braden but seemingly mispronounced the word “negro,” making it sound instead like a slur.

Later in the game, Kuiper apologized on the air without getting into specifics.

“Welcome back to Kauffman Stadium. I just want to … a little bit earlier in the show, I said something, didn’t come out quite the way I wanted it to,” Kuiper said. “And I just wanted to apologize if it sounded different than I meant it to be said. And like I said, I just wanted to apologize for that.”

The A’s later issued a statement, calling the language used by Kuiper “unacceptable.”

“The Oakland Athletics do not condone such language,” the team said. “We are working to address the situation.”

Kuiper has been calling A’s games in the Bay Area for about 20 years. He is the younger brother of former major leaguer and Giants announcer Duane Kuiper.

___

AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlb and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

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May 5, 2023
San Francisco board receptive to ambitious reparations plan

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SAN FRANCISCO — Payments of $5 million to every eligible Black adult, the elimination of personal debt and tax burdens, guaranteed annual incomes of at least $97,000 for 250 years and homes in San Francisco for just $1 a family.

These were some of the more than 100 recommendations made by a city-appointed reparations committee tasked with the thorny question of how to atone for centuries of slavery and systemic racism. And the San Francisco Board of Supervisors hearing the report for the first time Tuesday voiced enthusiastic support for the ideas listed, with some saying money should not stop the city from doing the right thing.

Several supervisors said they were surprised to hear pushback from politically liberal San Franciscans apparently unaware that the legacy of slavery and racist policies continues to keep Black Americans on the bottom rungs of health, education and economic prosperity, and overrepresented in prisons and homeless populations.

“Those of my constituents who lost their minds about this proposal, it’s not something we’re doing or we would do for other people. It’s something we would do for our future, for everybody’s collective future,” said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, whose district includes the heavily LGBTQ Castro neighborhood.

The draft reparations plan, released in December, is unmatched nationwide in its specificity and breadth. The committee hasn’t done an analysis of the cost of the proposals, but critics have slammed the plan as financially and politically impossible. An estimate from Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, which leans conservative, has said it would cost each non-Black family in the city at least $600,000.

Tuesday’s unanimous expressions of support for reparations by the board do not mean all the recommendations will ultimately be adopted, as the body can vote to approve, reject or change any or all of them. A final committee report is due in June.

Some supervisors have said previously that the city can’t afford any major reparations payments right now given its deep deficit amid a tech industry downturn.

Tinisch Hollins, vice-chair of the African American Reparations Advisory Committee, alluded to those comments, and several people who lined up to speak reminded the board they would be watching closely what the supervisors do next.

“I don’t need to impress upon you the fact that we are setting a national precedent here in San Francisco,” Hollins said. “What we are asking for and what we’re demanding for is a real commitment to what we need to move things forward.”

The idea of paying compensation for slavery has gained traction across cities and universities. In 2020, California became the first state to form a reparations task force and is still struggling to put a price tag on what is owed.

The idea has not been taken up at the federal level.

In San Francisco, Black residents once made up more than 13% of the city’s population, but more than 50 years later, they account for less than 6% of the city’s residents — and 38% of its homeless population. The Fillmore District once thrived with Black-owned night clubs and shops until government redevelopment in the 1960s forced out residents.

Fewer than 50,000 Black people still live in the city, and it’s not clear how many would be eligible. Possible criteria include having lived in the city during certain time periods and descending from someone “incarcerated for the failed War on Drugs.”

Critics say the payouts make no sense in a state and city that never enslaved Black people. Opponents generally say taxpayers who were never slave owners should not have to pay money to people who were not enslaved.

Advocates say that view ignores a wealth of data and historical evidence showing that long after U.S. slavery officially ended in 1865, government policies and practices worked to imprison Black people at higher rates, deny access to home and business loans and restrict where they could work and live.

Justin Hansford, a professor at Howard University School of Law, says no municipal reparations plan will have enough money to right the wrongs of slavery, but he appreciates any attempts to “genuinely, legitimately, authentically” make things right. And that includes cash, he said.

“If you’re going to try to say you’re sorry, you have to speak in the language that people understand, and money is that language,” he said.

John Dennis, chair of the San Francisco Republican Party, does not support reparations although he says he’d support a serious conversation on the topic. He doesn’t consider the board’s discussion of $5 million payments to be one.

“This conversation we’re having in San Francisco is completely unserious. They just threw a number up, there’s no analysis,” Dennis said. “It seems ridiculous, and it also seems that this is the one city where it could possibly pass.”

The board created the 15-member reparations committee in late 2020, months after California Gov. Gavin Newsom approved a statewide task force amid national turmoil after a white Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, a Black man.

The committee continues to deliberate recommendations, including monetary compensation, and its report is due to the Legislature on July 1. At that point it will be up to lawmakers to draft and pass legislation.

The state panel made the controversial decision in March to limit reparations to descendants of Black people who were in the country in the 19th century. Some reparations advocates said that approach does take into account the harms that Black immigrants suffer.

Under San Francisco’s draft recommendation, a person would have to be at least 18 years old and have identified as “Black/African American” in public documents for at least 10 years. Eligible people must also meet two of eight other criteria, though the list may change.

Those criteria include being born in or migrating to San Francisco between 1940 and 1996 and living in the city for least 13 years; being displaced from the city by urban renewal between 1954 and 1973, or the descendant of someone who was; attending the city’s public schools before they were fully desegregated; or being a descendant of an enslaved person.

The Chicago suburb of Evanston became the first U.S. city to fund reparations. The city gave money to qualifying people for home repairs, down payments and interest or late penalties due on property. In December, the Boston City Council approved of a reparations study task force.

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March 14, 2023
In ‘The Quiet Girl,’ a history making film for Ireland

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Irish filmmaker Colm Bairéad discovered Claire Keegan’s novella “Foster” a little later than most.

The “long short story,” as Keegan likes to call it, is told through the eyes of a 9-year-old girl in rural Ireland who leaves her overcrowded, neglectful family in the summer of 1981 to live with distant relatives— an older, childless couple. There, she experiences love and care for perhaps the first time in her life.

Published in The New Yorker in 2010, it won several awards and garnered comparisons to Seamus Heaney’s poetry and William Trevor’s stories.

Bairéad’s adaptation, “ The Quiet Girl,” (now playing in North America) has become no less significant and is proving to be a watershed moment for Irish cinema. Not only has it broken box office records in Ireland and the U.K., but it’s also the first Irish language film to compete for an Oscar.

And it might not have been possible had Bairéad encountered the story any earlier. It was in 2018 when he spotted it on a best of list of works by Irish women. He went out that day, bought it and read it. By the end, he was in tears and dreaming of a way to turn it into a film… in Irish.

“I felt like it was something I had to pursue with great conviction,” he said in a recent interview. “It just really affected me. I fell in love with every aspect from its emotional potency to its formal qualities. And it just felt so compassionate a piece of work. I felt a strong desire almost to shelter this young fictional child at the center of it kind of suffering in silence.”

Bairéad had been making short films in the Irish language for some years, having grown up bilingual in Irish and English. But though Irish is the official language of the country and on road signs and drivers’ licenses, English is the working language, he said. Feature films in Irish were practically unheard of. Before 2017, there’d been something like four ever made in the history of cinema.

In the past several years, that number has doubled thanks to the Cine4 initiative, a collaboration between Screen Ireland, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland and Irish public service broadcaster TG4, to fund and promote films made in Irish. Now, Irish language films are being made annually. But the global profile of and acclaim for “The Quiet Girl” (or “An Cailín Ciúin”) has been a game-changer.

“There was a big question mark over whether there was appetite for Irish language cinema and how would it be received,” he said. “Thankfully the answer to that has been a resounding yes.”

A large part of its success is its young star Catherine Clinch, who before “The Quiet Girl” had never acted on camera. Casting had stretched on for around seven months in the search for the right Cáit, who among other things needed to speak Irish.

One day, she and her classmates at her Irish language primary school received a sheet with information about auditions. Clinch went home and filmed a tape with her mother.

“I almost felt like we could have cast her from that,” Bairéad said. “She was really clever as well, because she filmed scenes in the appropriate rooms in her house. I remember being impressed by that.”

A chemistry test with Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennett, who would be playing her surrogate family, Eibhlín and Seán Kinsella, sealed it for everyone.

“They were sort of like a holy trinity,” he said. “We just knew this was our Cáit.”

Clinch, who is as soft spoken as her character, didn’t have techniques or tricks to embody the observant, internal Cáit as she navigates her new surroundings and bonds with the Kinsellas.

“I did try, even if she wasn’t saying anything, to imagine what she’d be thinking in that moment,” Clinch said.

“A natural,” Bairéad added.

When she got the part, her friends lovingly teased that “Catherine’s going to the Oscars.”

“But I definitely never thought that it was actually going to happen,” Clinch said.

The success of “The Quiet Girl” and other Irish projects like “The Banshees of Inisherin” are part of what some are calling a “ green wave ” in Hollywood. At this year’s Oscars, 14 nominees are Irish, including many of the cast and crew from “The Banshees of Inisherin,” like writer-director Martin McDonagh, actors Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon and Barry Keoghan, actor Paul Mescal (“Aftersun”), editor Jonathan Redmond (“Elvis”) and VFX animator Richard Baneham (“Avatar: The Way of Water”).

“We’ve actually all gotten to know each other during the awards season. It’s been a really lovely experience,” Bairéad said. “It’s not every day that you get to represent your country. This is a very special moment.”

But beyond the significance for Ireland, what has been most striking to Bairéad has been the uniformity of response to “The Quiet Girl” since its prize-winning debut at the Berlin Film Festival this time last year.

“Wherever it plays, whether it’s South Korea or Australia or the U.K., France or Spain, I mean, it’s the same response, the same emotional outpouring that you receive from audiences at the end of the film,” he said. “I think it’s a testament to Claire Keegan’s original source material, which itself has been translated into many languages. I think that the basic elements are really universal to the point that you could probably tell this story anywhere.”

___

For more on this year’s Oscars, visit: https://apnews.com/hub/academy-awards.

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March 3, 2023
Benedict’s 2013 resignation shook a routine Vatican ceremony

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VATICAN CITY (AP) — Veteran reporter Giovanna Chirri was starting to doze off in the Vatican press room on a slow holiday when all of a sudden the Latin she learned in high school made her perk up — and gave her the scoop of a lifetime.

It was Feb. 11, 2013, and Chirri was watching closed-circuit television coverage of Pope Benedict XVI presiding over a pro-forma meeting of cardinals to set dates for three upcoming canonizations.

But at the end of the ceremony, rather than stand up and leave the Consistory Hall of the Apostolic Palace, Benedict remained seated, took out a single sheet of paper and began to read.

“I have convoked you to this consistory, not only for the three canonizations, but also to communicate to you a decision of great importance for the life of the Church,” Benedict said quietly in his German-clipped Latin.

Chirri followed along but only began to realize the import of what was unfolding when she heard Benedict then utter the words “ingravescente aetate.” The term is Latin for “advanced age,” and is the title of a 1970 Vatican regulation requiring bishops to retire when they turn 75.

Knowing both Latin and Vatican regulations well, Chirri slowly began to realize that Benedict had just announced he too would be retiring, at the end of the month, because he believed he was getting too old for the job.

It was the first papal resignation in 600 years, and Chirri, the Vatican correspondent for the authoritative ANSA news agency, was about to report the news to the world.

“Hearing this ‘ingravescente aetate’ I started to feel sick physically, a really, really violent reaction,” Chirri recalled years later.

Her head felt like it was a balloon inflating. Her left leg began to shake so uncontrollably that she had to hold it down with one hand as she started making phone calls to her Vatican sources to check that she had heard Benedict correctly.

After finally receiving confirmation from the Vatican spokesman, Chirri sent the flash headline on ANSA at 11:46 a.m.

“The pope is leaving the pontificate beginning 2/28,” it read.

Benedict died Saturday, almost a decade after that momentous day.

Years later, Chirri still searches for the right words to express the emotional, physical, professional and intellectual combustion that that headline, and all it implied, caused her.

“I was terrified by news that was unthinkable to me,” she said.

Aside from the fact that she truly liked Benedict as a pope, Chirri couldn’t comprehend that the conservative German theologian who spent his life upholding church rules and doctrine would take the revolutionary step of resigning.

“Now eight years have passed and we’re used to it,” she said in an interview in 2021. “But eight years ago, the idea that the pope might resign was beyond (reality). It was a theoretical hypothesis” that was technically possible but had been rejected repeatedly by popes over the centuries.

Chirri won accolades for having had both the intellectual capacity to understand what had transpired, and the steely nerves to report it first and accurately among mainstream news organizations — no small feat considering the near-official authority that an ANSA headline carries in reporting Vatican news.

It was a holiday in the Vatican that day — the anniversary of the Lateran Accords between Italy and the Vatican — and only a handful of other reporters were even in the press room to hear the in-house broadcast of the ceremony.

But Chirri was there, the right person in the right place at the right time.

“Certainly, if I hadn’t been an Italian who studied Latin in the 1970s in Italy, I never would have understood a thing,” Chirri said of Italy’s classics-heavy public high school curriculum.

“Also, because the pope was reading so calmly, it was like he was telling us what he had had for breakfast that morning,” she added.

Only later, would it emerge that Benedict had been planning to retire for months. A nighttime fall during a 2012 trip to Mexico confirmed to him that he no longer had the strength for the globe-trotting rigors of the 21st century papacy.

Benedict knew well what was required to make the announcement legitimate: Though only a handful of popes had done it before, canon law allows for a papal resignation as long as it is “freely made and properly manifested.”

Some traditionalists and conspiracy theorists would later quibble with the grammatical formula Benedict used, claiming it rendered the announcement null and that Benedict was still pope.

But Benedict fulfilled both requirements under the law: He stated that he had come to the decision freely, made it public in a Vatican ceremony using the official language of the Holy See, and repeated it for years to come to remove any doubt.

“As far as canon law is concerned, it’s impeccable,” Chirri said.

And for anyone paying attention, Benedict had hinted about his intentions for years.

In 2009, during a visit to the earthquake-ravaged city of L’Aquila, Benedict prayed at the tomb of Pope Celestine V, the hermit pope who stepped down in 1294 after just five months in office. Benedict left on Celestine’s tomb a pallium — the simple white woolen stole that is a symbol of the papacy.

No one thought much of it at the time. But in retrospect, a pope leaving behind a potent symbol of the papacy on the tomb of a pope who had resigned carried a message.

One year later, in a 2010 book-length interview, Benedict said point-blank that popes not only could but should resign under certain circumstances, though he stressed that retirement was not an option to escape a particular burden.

“If a pope clearly realizes that he is no longer physically, psychologically and spiritually capable of handling the duties of his office, then he has a right, and under some circumstances, also an obligation to resign,” Benedict said in “Light of the World.”

He essentially laid out that same rationale to his cardinals on that chilly February morning.

“After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine (St. Peter) ministry,” he said.

He said that in modern world, “strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.”

Closing out his remarks, Benedict thanked the cardinals for their love and service and begged their forgiveness for his defects.

And in a promise he kept to the very end, he vowed to continue serving the church “through a life dedicated to prayer.”

___

Follow AP’s coverage of the death of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI at https://apnews.com/hub/pope-benedict-xvi

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January 2, 2023
Ukrainian Devs Remind Us Life Is Still Hell As Russian Missiles Strike Cities

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Photo: Anadolu Agency (Getty Images)

It feels like forever since the war in Ukraine began, but it hasn’t even been a year; Russian tanks rolled across the border in February, just ten months ago. Yet what was once headline news has now blurred into the background for most of us, a conflict that for the rest of the world is now simmering three scrolls down the front page of a news website.

For the tens of millions of people still directly affected by the war, though, little has changed! Ukrainians are still under siege, their lands still invaded, their armed forces still locked in a struggle against a nation that within living memory was still considered a superpower.

And while the last few months have seen Ukraine gain the upper hand on the frontlines, Putin’s growing desperation has also led to a switch in tactics. With swift battlefield gains now a thing of the past, Russia has begun attacking Ukrainian cities with drones and missiles, hoping to not only knock out the nation’s fragile power network (world leaders pledged nearly $500 million just this week to help keep the lights on) but also inflict terror on the civilian population.

Amidst all this, Ukranians are still trying to live their lives. Including Frogwares, the developers best known for their work on the Sherlock Holmes series of games. We’ve written about their situation before, first for a miraculous Switch release given the circumstances, then for some much-needed help “relocating employees to safer areas”.

Today, the team have shared a number of images and stories on Twitter showing what the war looks like in December 2022 for those who don’t have luxury of ignoring it on the news. I’m sharing them below, but if you’d rather see them as the HellSite intended, you can find the thread here.

G/O Media may get a commission

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Luke Plunkett

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December 22, 2022
Purdue reprimands campus official for mocking Asian remark

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HAMMOND, Ind. — Purdue University said Thursday its Board of Trustees had formally reprimanded the top official of its northwestern Indiana campuses over his mocking of Asian languages during a recent commencement ceremony.

The faculty senate of Purdue University Northwest has demanded the resignation of Chancellor Thomas Keon despite his apology over his impression of a fake Asian-sounding language during the Dec. 10 event.

The university’s statement released Thursday called Keon’s action an “offhand attempt at humor” that was “extremely offensive and insensitive.” The statement said while the “offensive remark does not reflect a pattern of behavior or a system of beliefs held by Dr. Keon, the Board has made clear to him that a repeat incident of a similar nature would provide grounds for further Board action, including possible dismissal.”

Faculty senate Chairman Thomas Roach said 87% of faculty members who responded to a poll this week voted no-confidence in Keon and questioned why Purdue officials were supporting him.

“No university faculty should be represented by somebody that they don’t accept,” Roach said.

Purdue Northwest has about 9,000 students at campuses in Hammond and Westville.

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December 22, 2022
Faculty: Purdue Northwest CEO must resign for racist remarks

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HAMMOND, Ind. — The faculty senate of Purdue University Northwest is demanding the resignation of CEO and Chancellor Thomas Keon after he mocked Asian languages during commencement.

The open letter signed by eight members of the senate’s executive committee called for Keon to step down because the remark insulted Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and the “inexcusable behavior caused national and international outrage.”

“His behavior does not reflect the diversity and inclusiveness that Purdue faculty, staff and students value,” said the letter released Friday.

Keon apologized Thursday for the Dec. 10 remark.

“I made a comment that was offensive and insensitive,” Keon said. “I am truly sorry for my unplanned, off-the-cuff response to another speaker, as my words have caused confusion, pain and anger.”

Keon’s gaffe came after keynote speaker James Dedelow referenced a made-up language he sometimes uses on a radio show he hosts with family. Keon responded with an impression that he said was “sort of my Asian version” of Dedelow’s offering.

A message left with a spokesperson for Purdue University Northwest was not immediately returned on Sunday.

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December 18, 2022
Weird Facts

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The first Polish language dictionary (published in 1746) included definitions such as: “Horse: Everyone knows what a horse is.”

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September 27, 2022
Become Conversationally Proficient in Spanish in Just 30 Days, With Savvy Traveler Co. Courses

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Language immersion through virtual world classroom experiences drives a new level of student engagement and lifetime access.

Press Release
–

updated: Jun 29, 2017

Bozeman, United States, June 28, 2017 (Newswire.com)
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The SAVVY TRAVELER Spanish course is overlapped with all the most-asked questions for English speakers learning Spanish. The course includes 4.5 hours of audio media and includes lifetime access to the course to refresh their skills whenever they would like. Each course also includes a private Facebook group of classmates and on-demand tutors from www.italki.com and professional teachers who are certified professionals and highly-skilled in the art of foreign language acquisition.

Here is a great new opportunity to enhance, refresh, or create language skills The Spanish course is contained in 4.5 hours of video that can be learned 10 to 15 minutes a day or 4.5 hours on your own schedule in 30 days. These courses are taught from all the most asked questions for how to cross the language bridge from English to Spanish, French or Italian. They are based on courses taught at the Alliance Française’s International Language School at the Emerson Cultural Center in Bozeman, Montana.

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The Savvy Traveler Spanish course is currently available with the Italian and French language courses slated to start in Oct. 2017. The Chinese language will launch in July 2018. To learn more or sign up for language classes, visit SavvyTraveler.co.

About Savvy Traveler Co.

Savvy Traveler Co. is made for travelers, multi-lingual families, students, medical professionals, and all business men and women who want to cross the language bridge. Savvy Traveler Co. courses help students become conversationally proficient in Spanish, Italian or French in 30 days.

Source: Savvy Traveler Co. Media Contact:
Alaina García
Phone: 406.599.5026
Email: admin@savvytraveler.co

Source: Savvy Traveler Co.

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June 28, 2017