Last week a local elementary school held an annual adult spelling bee to help raise funds for the PTO. I'm not a great speller, but it's a fun event, and I've participated on a team with some of my coworkers for the past couple of years. I flubbed numerous words this year, including sassafras, ingenue, pistachio, and protege, but my two teammates were on fire, only missing one word apiece - opossum and dachshund - and getting right some pretty nifty words such as ipecac, bunraku, and gouache - so we ended up doing pretty well: out of 10 teams, we came in second place - one point behind the first-place team.
I felt silliest, though, when I accidentally spelled Cossack with a "K"! I read DailyKos so often that the nickname Kossack was stuck in my head - so stuck that at the moment I was spelling it out, I was actually confident that I had nailed it!
(Trivia for spelling bee fans: we had a special treat this year - one of the pronouncers at the bee was Jacques Bailly, the official pronouncer for the national spelling bee - and a former national spelling bee champ himself - who happens to live nearby.)