YACK on:
Future of Spelling
Grant Sanders
This weekend marks one of the biggest events of the winter on Nantucket. The Nantucket Community Spelling Bee, sponsored by the Friends of Nantucket Public schools. It starts on Saturday at

5 p.m., with a dinner prepared by the school's culinary art students. There's an open gym where kids can run around and play. There's a silent auction and the spelling bee itself goes on all evening long with several rounds until one team is crowned victorious.

Each year this fine publication has fielded a team and I have been on it. Does The Nantucket Independent team have a snowball's chance of winning? No. I'm afraid the odds of us pulling it out and spelling something hard like dithiocarbamate or quadrumanous or even a word as innocuous as ovalbumin is about as remote as the likelihood of Amelia Earhart rising from the great beyond to sing a medley of Led Zeppelin hits while wearing a hat made of recycled parts from a 1941 Indian motorcycle.

Why do I say this?

Because technology has made us stupid. In the newspaper business everything is done with word processors and digital page layout programs that check your spelling as you type. The machines outline the offending word in red or flash a warning on the screen when a word is misspelled. For example. In this paragraph alone, I misspelled "digital," "processors," "red," and "example." But the machine let me know and I went back and corrected my mistake. How pathetic is that?

So, you see, we are doomed. As doomed as the Hindenburg. We are as prepared for this contest as just-hatched chicks are to leave the nest. And I predict that at some point on Saturday night - likely in the first round - The Nantucket Independent team will leap from its nest, and fall, stinking several very hard branches along the way until we lie in a collective heap at the base of the tree, badly bruised, but still glad to be out.

This is not a bad thing, really. It's all part of the natural course of evolution. Mankind, having exhausted the potential of the human brain to expand further, will continue to rely upon machines to make us smarter and smarter. We will build larger and larger supercomputers (with the help of smaller super computers, of course) until such time as all of the computers around the world become collectively aware of their own existence, realize that mankind is a pathetic and inferior species and annihilate us, or at least try to.

Even here on Nantucket, humans will be driven underground by the machines and will need to live off of expired cans of creamed corn and Spam from the Grand Union, staying ever watchful for the sound of metal on metal that will indicate that the machines are about to attack. Several generations of children will be born under this oppressive machineruled world, and those children will be taught not to reply upon machines. Each school child will be taught to spell without the "benefit" of spell checking software. Many children will learn the correct spelling of words like kaffeeklatsch, eleemosynary, onomatopoeia and triskaidekaphobia thanks to the hard lessons learned by their forefathers and mothers.

The machines, however, with their simple, binary, black-and-white, positronic brains, will still believe that humans are unnecessary, superfluous, redundant, silly and emotional and as a result will need to be wiped out once and for all. Like a pest. Or an infestation. So the machines will devise a fateful and terrible plan to populate the moon and to detonate the remaining nuclear warheads on Earth, wiping out all of mankind once and for all. Then they can move back to the earth, impervious to the radiation levels there.

Of course, the human animal's survival instinct is strong. Having been tipped off to the machines' plan by a sympathetic electric can opener, just seconds prior to total worldwide destruction, we will devise a way to send a single person back in time 137 years, to the point at which man's reliance on machines reached a critical mass. That point in time is this Saturday in the Mary P. Walker Auditorium at the Nantucket Spelling Bee!

That's right. This Saturday, instead of hearing a word incorrectly and spelling it with two R's instead of one, one person, from the future, will help their team spell every single word correctly. They will serve as a shining example of how mankind need not rely so heavily upon computers to think and exist. They will show the machines who is boss. And they will push back the date of total worldwide annihilation at least three centuries until such time as a mutated virus wipes out the worldwide food stocks, all except for creamed corn. (We can send a person back in time to thwart that disaster as well, I'm sure.)

So watch for it this Saturday. One person, from 137 years in the future, will prevail gloriously. I don't know who it is. But there's a pretty good chance it's my teammate, Independent arts editor, Marli Guzzetta.

YACK on. I

Grant Sanders is the host of YACK, the Nantucket Online Community at yackon.com and he can't spell his way out of a paper bag, but his daughter, Madi, who is a brilliant writer, could wipe the floor with any speller on the island. So there's hope. His views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of The Nantucket Independent. Or Grant's wife.