channel your inner e.e.cummings for the bee

Sue Sheridan has pointed out that a few of the words in the published word list begin with capitals: for example, "Pajamas" and "Sesquipedal". Should Bee contestants study these capitalizations as part of the word spellings?

Fear not! The capitals in the word list were small failures in my ongoing battle with Microsoft Word (which thinks that any word at the beginning of a line or paragraph ought to be capitalized, so I had to go back in by hand and put them into lower-case)--some days I can't get Word to speak English, some days it won't listen to my capitalization rules.... It is not easy, doing these words for you Bee Spellers. I won't even go into how many of the more difficult words trip up SpellCheck....

Anyway, software gripes aside, know this: NOBODY WILL BE PENALIZED AT THE BEE FOR SPELLING WITHOUT PROPER CAPITALIZATION. Trust me, your handwriting is already hard enough for the judges to read. Plus, this is a spelling bee, not a grammar bee! Just spell the word correctly; that will suffice.

Wishing you a productive and enjoyable week with the words,
Kate