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Letters and laughs at the National Spelling Bee

OXON HILL, Md. - Forget the spelling. Victoria Allen was looking for a punch line. "I only want a sentence if it's funny," the 14-year-old from Green River, Wyo., said upon getting the word salaam on Wednesday at the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

OXON HILL, Md. - Forget the spelling. Victoria Allen was looking for a punch line.

"I only want a sentence if it's funny," the 14-year-old from Green River, Wyo., said upon getting the word salaam on Wednesday at the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

"Well," replied pronouncer Jacques Bailly, checking his computer screen. "I don't think I have one."

"Shame," said Victoria, looking a tad disappointed - even though she correctly spelled the word.

The Big Bang Theory doesn't have a monopoly on nerd TV humor, not the way the spelling bee is going. The preliminary rounds were just as memorable for comedic sentences as for any spellings or misspellings of words like catalepsy or mastodon.

"Andre promised to regale his friends with tales of his entire odyssey," Bailly told one speller, "but it turned out just to be a 45-minute story about the time he got lost in Costco for 35 minutes."

After the laughter subsided, Lillian Allingham, 14, of Hockessin, Del., completed that bit of spelling odyssey by correctly spelling the word.

Forty-six spellers advanced to the semifinals using scores from onstage words and a computerized spelling-vocabulary test, their achievements vying for attention with jokes about the George Foreman grill and the game Minesweeper. No spellers from the Philadelphia area reached the semifinals, though Aparita Rao, 13, from Hummelstown, in Dauphin County, did.

More humor is on tap for the final day of competition Thursday, when the 87th champion will be crowned in prime time and shown on ESPN3.

"The objective is just to kind of cut the tension," Bailly said.

It began as an experiment in 2009, when bee director Paige Kimble hired a pair of Hollywood comedy writers to lighten up the proceedings.

Over the last five years, the sentences have become as much a part of the bee as the huge trophy and the doomsday bell.

Sometimes, though, the speller has the last laugh, such as when Bailly's sentence about the word Jacuzzi referred to someone turning into "The Amazing Prune Man."

"He sounds like a rally lame superhero," replied the speller, Mitchell Robson of Marblehead, Mass.

Stumpers

Think spell check would help in a bee? Think again. Officials say some words are unrecognizable to spell check. Words that stumped spellers and that might stop spell check, too, include:

babelism (a confusion of sound or sense)

velitation (a skirmish)

obtundent (lessening pain)

demegoric (related to public speaking)

otacoustic (assisting the sense of hearing)

pelagial (related to living in the sea)

topeng (Javanese dramatic performance involving masks)

SOURCE: National Spelling Bee EndText