...can never hurt me

If you're a spelling bee contestant where they're at a loss for them;

After 19 rounds in a Missouri county's annual spelling bee over the weekend, only two of the 25 contestants who started the competition remained.

Several hours and 47 rounds later, an 11-year-old and her 13-year-old adversary had used up all of the available words, forcing organizers of the Jackson County Spelling Bee to temporarily halt the showdown.

"It was legendary," said Mary Olive Thompson, a library outreach manager and co-coordinator of the Saturday spelling bee.

We suspect she's on to something there. Though it might help to tighten up the standards for the judges;

...bee officials decided not to pull more words from the dictionary because they worried one speller might get a tough word and the other a relatively easy one, which wouldn't be fair.

...."Scherzo," ''fantoccini" and "intaglio" were among the words Kush [Sharma] correctly spelled in the late rounds, while Sophia [Hoffman] nailed words such as "schadenfreude, "mahout" and "barukhzy."

Both of them missed what Kush said was the hardest word: a "French word; I have no idea how to pronounce it. It was a long word."

We wager one of the kids could have.