ATLANTA - The word 13-year-old Heather Buzzard had to spell correctly to win the Georgia State Spelling Bee Friday is so obscure, it's not even ``sthene'' in the dictionary. <br>
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But Heather spelled the word -- ``sthene'', a mechanical term for a unit of force not found in most standard dictionaries -- correctly and without hesitation today, winning a thousand dollars and the right to represent Georgia in the National Spelling Bee in Washington later this year. <br>
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That was after 20 of the state's best spellers worked their way through a list of 244 words that could stump a professor of linguistics. <br>
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Heather, a tall teen-ager who has been home-schooled her whole life by her mother, Barbara Buzzard, also had to correctly spell ``gymkhana,'' the word that tripped up Friday's second-place winner, 10-year-old Trent Kim of Athens. <br>
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A gymkhana is a field where horse riding and other athletic events are held. <br>
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The two finalists, who went head to head for more than 30 words before the end, had nearly opposite strategies. Heather asked for words to be repeated, defined and used in a sentence nearly every time she took her turn, and often appeared to agonize over tricky syllables. <br>
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Trent just blurted them out with seemingly infinite confidence.
