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No joke, pyrometallurgical decides county spelling bee

STOCKTON — Everything was going fine until the spellmaster read the next word: pyrometallurgical.

Wait … what? That’s right: pyro-metal-lurgi-cal.

Brookside sixth-grader Sepenta Shirvan of Lodi Unified couldn’t help it; she laughed when she heard it, along with the rest of the audience Wednesday at the 18th annual San Joaquin County Spelling Bee Championship.

“Don’t ask me to try to pronounce it again,” spellmaster Veray Wickham said, only half-jokingly.

The word, indeed, was a trial by fire. Sepenta hesitated, then carefully spelled out “p-i-r-o-m-e-d-a-l-l-u-r-g-i-c-a-l.” With that mistake, only her second in 11 increasingly grueling rounds against 15 of the county’s top spellers, Sepenta became runner-up to Ripon Christian sixth-grader Caleb Terpsma in the fourth- to sixth-grade division championship.

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Posted: 12/4/2014