For hours, they fought hard and, with the ding of the bell, dropped like flies — bested by words most people won’t hear in a lifetime. It ended in dramatic fashion as two eighth graders, barely tall enough to see over the microphone, went back and forth misspelling words until one of them got it right.
In the end, Keith Lee, 13, bested Joshua Bala, 14, for first place by correctly spelling puparium, a rigid outer shell formed from larval skin, and verbigerate, the action of repeating a word or sentence endlessly and meaninglessly…