By HARRIS LEVINSON

For The Beachcomber

Watch out, would-be Island spellers: The Icelandic Sledders are now in training for this year’s Third Annual Community Spelling Bee, sponsored by the Vashon Community Scholarship Fund.

Two years ago, the triumphant triumvirate of Vashon High School teachers with a penchant for fashionable sweaters from Reykjavik took home first place hardware from the Island’s inaugural spelling bee with an a cappella rendering of “peccadillo” that left the crowd breathless, and slightly offended.

“It was rather funny, to tell you the truth,” remembered Stephonious Floydian, the team’s classicist and dramaturge, “because we had just finished lunching on at least 12 peccadilloes that very afternoon.”

Many Islanders could not believe when the Icelanders bowed out in the quarterfinals the following year.

“They misspelled ‘skeuomorph,’ a word I had invented especially for the occasion,” recalled Island lexicographer and emcee Jeanne Dougherty.

With a disappointing third- place finish, the team began to doubt themselves. “That’s not a pleasant memory; please don’t speak of it again,” commented a still suffering Michael “Al-Jazeera” Zecher, who was let go by the team’s ownership in a midnight hush-hush when they discovered that the highly regarded Vashon historiographer had been convicted of Howard Zinn hagiography and polluting the Rubicon for his own purposes.

This year the veteran squad returns with a new addition to its roster, closer Tom “The Penguin” Perudyptes Devriesi. A noted paleontologist and devotee of all things Icelandic, DeVries also has the distinction of hailing from the Boston area, a quality that neuroscientists have repeatedly shown to be helpful in every endeavor, be it academic or athletic.

“The boys from the English department certainly stepped up their game by bringing me on board,” reflected the modest man with a doctorate in orthography. While many of us try to remember when the “i” does not come before “e,” DeVries now contracts with the Modern Language Association in both Chile and Peru and retains the final say about which words will be granted any diphthong whatsoever, including ligatures.

While some of their high school students grumble about the fact that these men have all but abandoned their curriculum this year in order to prepare for the upcoming bee, the teachers remind them that the money from the VCSF sponsored event all goes to student scholarships and that they’d do well to quit their yapping.

Other students remain much more amenable, as junior Ginger Krinsky indicated: “At first, I felt like the scope of my American Studies class might be, like, compromised, but then we learned that ‘pickelhaube’ is not spelled ‘picklehaube,’ and even my dad didn’t know that, so it’s all good.”

­— Island humanities teacher and Icelandic Sledder Harris Levinson reminds readers that the Slavs favor “k”s and hard “g”s, as in “kishke” and “gulag.”

The bee

The third annual Community Spelling Bee, a fundraiser for Vashon Community Scholarship Fund, will take place at 3 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 8, at the Vashon High School theater.