"Can you, like, repeat it slowly?" asked Annie Huang, speller 100, asked after hearing her word: menehune.
The seventh grader, from British Columbia in Canada, wanted to know more.
"Is there, like, a root word or like something?" she asked. "Is the spelling, like, counterintuitive in any way?"
"That depends on your intuition," Dr. Bailly responded.
Annie misspelled the word, a small mythical Polynesian being living in the mountains and working at night as a stone builder. She is out.
