NUPURMANIAA Spelling Bee Champ's Abstemious IpseityPublished November, 2003
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Photo by: Nupur's roommate | Sent from: Ann Arbor, MI
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It’s unequivocally insuppositious to assume an atypical zealous orthography student suffers from logorrhea or other such debilitating psychosomatic ecclesiasticalisms. Surely it’s self-evident that eccentricity-wiccentries such as verbosityisms and synaciticallyisms are simply manifestiabiliyisms that only a verbose moron would culimatorywatoryicise in unfeasibilitatory obviousity. But is it an obvious switcher? Non, merci!
Whenever I think of how much I love Spellbound, the documentary about the 1999 Nerd Olympics (a.k.a. National Spelling Bee), I come across intelligentaliable and try to use big proper words the way Nupur Lala does. She’s beat 248 other spellers, ages nine to fifteen, to win $10,000 in cash and two airline tickets to wherever she wanted to go.
Today, Nupur is a gracefully aging freshman with a full scholarship at Michigan State University. We called her up to ask how she’d been doing since pulling off the three completely heroic feats of:
1. Becoming the cleverest teenager in America.
2. Being the star of an Oscar-nominated movie.
3. Becoming No. 1 nerd babe in the world by way of her cute looks and cupronickelitist mannerisisimsability.
VICE: You must have been pretty stoked when you won. You must have been like, “Ha ha, suckas!!!”
Nupur: The best part of the actual spelling bee wasn’t winning actually, but making lifelong friends and forming bonds with the other spellers. I still keep in touch with most of them. The most beneficial part is being around so many people who share the same passion for words.
Your mom and dad must have been total monsters.
No, my parents didn’t pressure me to enter the spelling bee at all. I’d do the whole thing again if I could, but I can’t because once you win at the national level you’re automatically disqualified from all the other spelling competitions.
That’s bullshit, man!
It’s only fair that once you’ve won such an important event, somebody else gets the chance to experience winning it the next year.
Yeah, right. So who are your heroes?
Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Blackwell, who was the first female to graduate from medical school. I’m pre-med.
LESLEY ARFIN
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