What's the Good Word?

"Boys aren't good spellers because they aren't smart enough," volunteered twelve-year-old Contestant Nancy McDaniel last week. To prove it she pointed to her fellow finalists in the National Spelling Bee: 18 were girls, ten boys. But a few minutes later Nancy was out, for misspelling liar. About 400 words later, there were a boy and a girl left, each 13. The boy, shy and nervous, was John McKinney of Woodbine, Iowa (pop. 1,350); the girl, cool and confident, was Mary McCarthy of New York City (pop. 7,454,995).

Beneath them, in the audience at Washington's National Press Club, sat the three judges, with their copies of Funk & Wagnalls and Merriam Webster's International, the official sources (where the dictionaries differed, either spelling would do). Professor Harold F. Harding, the veteran "official pronouncer," threw a fast one at Mary: flaccid. Mary muffed the catch, spelled it phlaxid. John got it right, spelled the next word, too, semaphore, to cinch the national spelling championship and $700.

Some of the contestants went out on words they obviously knew, because of stage fright (one girl tripped on across). Indianapolis' entry, twelve-year-old William Frazer, wore a red-plaid "lucky" shirt, its pockets overflowing with rabbits' feet and four-leaf clovers. (He went out on mendacious.) The audience's obvious favorite was Mattie Lou Pollard, 13, who goes to a one-room schoolhouse in Thomaston, Ga. and has had only one teacher all her life. (She lost on anarchy.) Third-place winner, Leslie Dean, 12, of Hawthorne, N.J., flunked on asceticism. Other toughies: hypotenuse, covenants, queue, knavery, cataclysm, colander, staccato, abscess.

National Champion McKinney, chewing gum confidently after it was over, spilled the secret of his success: "I read a lot. What, for instance? Oh, lots of things. But I'll tell you something I like. It's the Journal of the American Medical Association."

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