Here we go with funny moment number two in
throughout this semester:
Obviously, speech and debate was a huge
part of my life this year. I spent my entire last post talking about my
participation in the Forensics world, and have mentioned it several times
before in this course blog. I’ve had a lot of good times on the TCU Forensics
team, which is why two of my humorous posts revolve around things that happened
because of my participation in speech and debate. I know you guys are dying to
hear the next story, so here goes.
I left off talking about my experience
making it to nationals, and now I’m going to tell y’all about my experience at
nationals. The American Forensics Association national individual speech tournament
is a big tournament. It’s the hardest national speech tournament to qualify for
in the country, and, due to its size, spans for three days of competition. Mind
you, these are long competition days. Each day lasted 12-14 hours, so you can
understand that by the end of the second day, our brains were pretty much
fried.
Only one other person from TCU made it to
nationals this year: Alexa Aragonez. So the national tournament team consisted
of Alexa, myself, and our coach. Because there were so few of us, we decided to
go out to eat with two other teams we’re friends with at the end of the second
day. Note that this means 20 fried speech contestants and coaches were all
sitting around a table trading silly stories about one another.
We were all laughing and joking, and for
some reason we started talking about middle names and weird spellings of names.
Alexa apparently does not have a middle name. Her parents just decided not to
give her one. We discussed the fact that her name was simply Alexa Aragonez,
and then started talking about how bad judges at speech competitions have
butchered the pronunciation of Aragonez. Alexa was complaining that it’s hard
for people to say because they can’t spell it, at which point I piped in that I
didn’t think it was that hard to spell. Alexa, feeling sassy by that point,
decided to challenge me and said “oh yeah, then how do you spell it?” Without
missing a beat, I looked back and said “Better than you do, Alex.”
Alexa, my coach, and I died laughing. Keep
in mind that we were all sleep deprived and the comment I made was a pretty
good burn. But then we noticed that nobody else was laughing along with us (as
probably many of you are confused at this point, too). We quickly explained the
context of the joke to our friends sitting next to us.
At the district competition, in Alexa’s
final round, she messed up signing her name on the marker board for the judges
to copy onto their ballots. It was the last round of another long day of
competition and she apparently wasn’t thinking. Because of that, she connected
the last A of her first name with the first A in her last name. This means
that, to the judges, her name read “AlexArogonez.” Alexa didn’t realize she did
this, but the rest of the team and I did. That’s why when the announcer called
her name as “Alex Aragonez” during the awards ceremony, we laughed and she got
confused.
When I made the joke that I could spell
Alexa’s name “better than you can, Alex,” I was referencing Alexa’s mess up at
district competition. Alexa’s name is apparently so hard to spell that she can’t
even spell it when she’s tired, which is why the joke was funny, and why the
cognitive shift in my response was so perfectly timed both in the moment and in
the context of the conversation at hand.
After
we finished explaining why my joke was funny to our friends at dinner, they
laughed too. It was a pretty good
burn, after all (if I do say so myself). Hopefully you all got a laugh out of
it too, once the context was explained to you. But, if the joke was lost
somewhere in translation, that’s okay. I still got a great laugh out of it with
my team at nationals, and it’s definitely a memory I’m going to keep with me as
I continue my speech and debate career. I doubt we’re ever going to let “Alex”
live down her spelling mistakes.
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