May 30, 2008 8:03 pm US/Pacific
14-Year-Old Perris Boy Eliminated From B-E-E
WASHINGTON
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Local boy makes g-o-o-d in spelling bee and comes home $750 richer. Austin Pineda would have gone further if he didn't misspell tralatious.
CBS
A 14-year old boy from Perris was eliminated in the Scripps National Spelling Bee when he misspelled tralatious.
Who even knows what that means!?
Austin Pineda had sailed through in earlier rounds spelling such toughies as dispendious, oleocellosis and torii (and that's not like Tori Spelling, get it?)
Pineda, an eighth-grader at Boulder Ridge Middle School in Romoland, was eliminated in the eighth round. He added a second L to tralatious...which is awfulll for him. (Does awfulll have three l's?)
Anyway, we digress. Young Austin was impressive nonetheless. He won
$750 smackeroonies (that's money) for his efforts.
Earlier in the competition, Pineda correctly spelled tombolo, zeppelin,
Zanzibari. Totally, rad Austin! (Rad, for the uninformed means "really good.")
The bee is limited to students in eighth grade or below, with contestants ranging in age from 8-year-old Sriram Hathwar of Painted Post, N.Y., the youngest contestant in the history of the Scripps National Spelling
Bee, which began in 1925, to two 15-year-olds. Hathwar failed to advance past the preliminary round.
In addition to the United States, the record field of 288 also included spellers from American Samoa, The Bahamas, Canada, Guam, Jamaica, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and one speller who lives on a U.S. Air Force base in Germany.
The winner will receive $30,000 from Scripps, $5,000 from the Sigma Phi
Epsilon Educational Foundation, a $2,500 U.S. savings bond from the dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster, and reference works from Encyclopaedia Britannica valued at more than $3,800.
Three Californians have won, including Evan M. O'Doreny of Walnut Creek
last year.
There has only been one Southern California winner (total bummer, which means "wow...we could do better"), Anurag Kashyap of Poway in 2005.
(© 2008 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Wire services contributed to this report.)
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