By Maya Palit
Twitter’s been exploding with praise for Ananya Vinay, a 12-year-old girl who became the most recent champion of a national spelling bee contest in the United States. She won by cracking the answers to rarely heard words like ‘marocain’, which is a type of dress fabric.
Perhaps the best thing about her interview on CNN was Vinay looking quizzical and amused about Trump’s recently used word ‘Covfefe’, and asking for details like ‘definition’, ‘language of origin’, and ‘part of speech’.
Perhaps the worst thing about the interview was an aside by Alisyn Camerota, a CNN anchor, who, for no fathomable reason, told Vinay that ‘covfefe’ was gibberish and then made an obtuse reference to her ethnicity: “…It is a nonsense word but we’re not sure that its root is in Sanskrit which is probably what you’re used to…”
Lots of Twitter users have taken on the anchor for her comment, with people explaining that Vinay is from Fresno, California, and that Camerota’s attempt at a quip was entirely unnecessary. A CNN spokesperson defended her by saying that Camerota made the Sanskrit reference before, and so was only guilty of recycling a joke.
A blazing Twitter war has already taken off. Maybe it’s too much to hope that Camerota will come out of it a little more informed about Sanskrit: that isn’t spoken fluently by every 12-year-old in India, that implying it is would be like asking a British child if they’re up to speed with Old English, and that pigeon-holing Vinay because of her South Asian descent is both boring and incredibly dense. Next time, maybe she could just congratulate a winner without a tedious joke about her origins.