The call the winner Murraya

I have often noticed that every topic we face in life has already been discussed on "The Simpsons."  And now, I am prepared to add another of those six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon things to my list of aphorisms:

Every good thing in life can be traced, directly or indirectly, to Bill Murray.

Here's the latest. You know I would be crazy about 14-year-old Zaila Avant-garde, who last Thursday became the first African American winner of the Scripps National Spelling Bee.  She won the prize by correctly spelling the word "murraya." 

<<<<This is murraya. Murraya paniculata is its full Latin name. You can find it as a tree, indoor shrub, or hedge in eastern Asia and Australia. 

Zaila, as all good spellers have always done, spends hours a day reading and learning words. Sometimes, they will employ mnemonic devices to help them remember. She even confirmed to the press that she remembered how to spell "murraya" by associating it with the actor. "I knew murraya because, as I'm sure I kind of implied, I'd always connected it with Bill Murray," she said.

Ms Avant-garde seems to have a bit of the comedian with her; she tossed out a Murray reference before confidently spelling the plant name at Thursday's nationall televised competition, asking, "Does this word contain the English name Murray, which could be the name of a comedian?" 

Later, interviewed by NPR, she said she would "like to say thank you to Bill Murray," explaining she used to listen to the soundtrack to his film Lost in Translation, and "that's how that word was stuck in my head because it was spelled like Bill Murray's name."

Botanist Charles Linnaeus named the plant after one of his Swedish botany students, and since he lived in the 1700s, there's no way he knew anything of the legendary comic actor born William James Murray in 1950.

She must be one of the coolest kids in the world. Besides being a whiz speller, she holds three Guinness world records for basketball dribbling. And she's no purveyor of false modesty. When John Berman of CNN asked her, "Is there anything that you're not good at?" she said "Not really. Just about everything I do, I'm good at." 

She's already being offered full-ride college scholarships, and has four career options in the fire: coaching basketball, working for NASA, or going into either neuroscience or gene editing.

She was given her last name by her father in honor of the late jazz musician John Coltrane.

Oh, and if you want your kids to get ready for next year's Bee, here are some words that Zaila had to spell correctly along the way:  "querimonious," "solidungulate," and "Nepeta."