By Richard Bammer
Young students who gathered Wednesday for an annual spell-off in Vacaville were seen, by turns, fidgeting, squirming, rolling their eyes and even using their palms and fingers to write out words, silent testimony to the following question: How do you solve a problem like the English language?
In the end, at the 2017 Grace B. Powell Citywide Spelling Bee, only one of 48 elementary students, Orchard sixth-grader Caitlin Peck, and one of 26 middle school students, Vacaville Christian eighth-grader Caitlin Sweany, were remotely able to answer the question through 40 or more rounds each, one word at a time, from any of the several different languages that comprise ever-evolving modern English, a hallmark of one of the world’s most common and sometimes frustrating languages.