CALEDONIA — Elizabeth Fain found her voice Saturday at the Mid-South Spelling Bee in Memphis. Literally.
Elizabeth, a home-schooled seventh-grader, had come down with a serious case of laryngitis in the week leading up to the regional bee, stealing her ability to speak just prior to the event.
“It really threw me off. Friday I had no voice at all,” said Elizabeth, the daughter of Jim and Nicole Fain of Caledonia.
Determined to compete, Elizabeth “just kept straining” until she managed an faintly audible voice Saturday, leading The Commercial Appeal to mistakenly label her as “soft-spoken” in a news story.
And the more she talked, the easier it became to speak.
“It was painful at first, but we went through so many rounds that it got better,” she says.
Elizabeth helped her cause by hanging around for 19 rounds of spelling, nine of which passed rapidly as she and one other contestant traded words for the championship.
In the end, it wasn”t Elizabeth”s day. She tripped on “roodebok,” substituting a “t” for the “d,” leaving the door open for eventual champion eighth-grader Briuna Green of Forrest City, Ark.
“It was really disappointing,” Elizabeth said of hearing the bell sound to signal she had misspelled a word. “It”s really hard when you”re so close and you don”t get it and you”re just one letter away.”
But looking at the big picture, Elizabeth is thrilled with her performance. She beat 43 of her 44 competitors. She won $200. And she had studied the 1,500-word master list well enough to know all but two of the words she drew.
She guessed correctly on the Arab word “mukhtar.”
“I knew there was an ”h” in there, but I didn”t know where,” she admits.
Elizabeth “wasn”t nervous at all up there” at the competition”s outset, but felt some butterflies after the field shrank to two contestants.
“At Mid-South, people take it really serious. I thought I had no chance. But when I got closer to the end and it was just me and the other girl, I started to get a little nervous,” she said.
Elizabeth did her best to outlast Green for the title and move on to the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee in Washington D.C. The junior astronomer also had her eye on the $500 grand prize, which she hoped to put toward a Celestron electronic telescope.
To return to Memphis next year, she must follow the same path she took this year: Winning the Christian Home Educators of Lowndes County spelling bee and the countywide spelling bee, which includes Columbus and Lowndes County schools.
This year”s countywide spelling bee was held Feb. 9 at Lee Middle School.
Elizabeth, who studies her words 30-60 minutes daily before each bee, enjoys the academic challenge the bees provide.
“I like the competition. In sports you only have two teams. In a spelling bee there are lots of other students to compete against,” she said.
Jason Browne was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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