Middle School student Cooper Komatsu – for years the premier speller of any age in Culver City – and 44 rivals advanced last evening to an ultimate showdown in America’s most prestigious spelling bee.

The fourth round is today as the original field of 285 students has been sharply pared.

At the Scripps National Spelling Bee in National Harbor, MD, Cooper, the best known eighth grader in the community, kept himself in the running for the championship by correctly navigating seldom-invoked two words.

No one either in the Maryland audience or among this newspaper’s readership ever has heard the two words sounded, let alone spelled or defined them.

• Tagasaste
• Adventitious

As you may have told your mate over the dinner table last evening during a discussion of diminutive evergreen trees, “We need a new tagasaste in the backyard, don’t you think?”
Whereupon your mate cracked, “You have a rare talent for being adventitious.”

You promptly scolded your mate for misusing the term. You explain that adventitious means something that occurs by chance.

Thirteen-year-old Mr. Komatsu, who made it to the semi-finals last May, has won the Los Angeles County Scripps Regionals the last two years to qualify for the nationals.

Cooper’s final word last evening was gudgeon, which you would be ill-advised to serve as the family dinner entrée tonight.

Unless your family is adventitious.