Spelling bees, which have always been popular among logolepts and verbiphages, are a particularly hot cultural touchstone now. In the past few years there have been two movies, a financially successful documentary, a Tony Award-winning musical, a classic “Simpsons” episode, as well as fiction and nonfiction books about these American-born contests. It’s gotten to the point where Starbucks has sponsored a film on the subject – the predictably frothy “Akeelah and the Bee.”

There are other nerdy contests between geniuses – chess tournaments, geography bees, and the stock market come to mind. But the most popular spelling bee – the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee – finishes up tonight. A record 275 contestants participated this year – from all 50 states, Jamaica, Guam, Canada, and New Zealand.

Tonight, for the first time in the bee’s 79-year history, the finals will be shown in prime time on ABC. This kind of exposure legitimizes spelling bees and their fans, but it is also as bittersweet for bee fans as it was for baseball purists when Wrigley Field began hosting night games in 1988.

As a spelling bee aficionado, I worry we’ve also lost a bit of the community aesthetic. That’s why I’ve become more interested in other spelling bees, like the ones held in Miami and Springfield, Ill., for deaf children. Hearing-impaired students are given a whole word in sign language and they have to sign or write the individual letters. Pennsylvania retirement communities from Crawford County to Stroudsburg host bees for senior citizens. In return for winning the 2006 Kiolbassa Spelling Bee in Texas, Stormey Slate received a basket of sausage, including Polish, jalapeno, beef, country, and Mexican-style chorizo. But my favorite event of this year’s spelling season occurred when the Boone County, Ky., librarians beat the sisters of St. Walburg Monastery in a 12-round spell down.

Whether it’s a love for any competition between humans or a love of words, the rising popularity of spelling bees is a good thing. For most people. There are those who protest the bee, saying our current spelling system discriminates against immigrants and is so difficult to learn that those who fail are often forced into a life of crime.

Elizabeth Kuizenga, who is perhaps best known as the mother of supermodel and X-Men actress Rebecca Romijn, is also known in more esoteric circles as a prominent member of the Simplified Spelling Society, a group that advocates phonemic spelling. There is empirical evidence that children’s confidence in their sense of logic is seriously undermined by English’s illogical spellings, she says.

“Indeed, many children just give up on school altogether as a result. The prisons are full of people with literacy problems,” says Ms. Kuizenga. (Did I mention that she is from Berkeley?)

Even if the idea sounded appealing, which regional pronunciation would be used? How would the word for the sister of your mother be spelled? And pronunciations change over time. Hangul, the Korean phonemic alphabet organized into syllabic blocks, is supposedly the best orthography in the world. Even it has become a slightly less good fit over the years. If the advocates of spelling reform had their way, spelling would have to change each time pronunciation changed.

What Ms. Kuizenga and her cohorts fail to understand, though, is that spelling bees are impressive precisely because English is so full of irregularities. And despite its various letter combinations and anomalies, spelling bees proudly stand for objective truth. Postmodernism may rule the day but when Dan Quayle encouraged a non-traditional spelling of the word potato, no one defended him by saying his version was valid because it was meaningful to him.

An appreciation for classic languages, an understanding of the human drive toward competition, a belief in objective truth – all these things show the surprising conservatism of the bee. A brochure from the early 1930s trumpeted the bee as “clean, dignified, conservative, and educational.”

So it should not be surprising that the spellers themselves tend to also represent conservative values. Students educated at home or in private or parochial schools represent a disproportionately large percentage of the spelling competition. They tend to come from intact, two-parent families. They all claim to read voraciously. The anti-spellers claim that their simplified spelling would help immigrants. In fact, many spelling finalists are multilingual and second-generation Americans, born to parents from Asia or the Middle East.

A spelling bee is not rote recitation; it’s a way for any individual child to study the world. The best spellers know that a word’s derivation has the clue to its larger meaning. That’s why so many spelling bee finalists are multilingual, a rare virtue among young students. The importance and illumination of Latin, Greek, French, German, and other root words would be lost through so-called phonemic spelling.

That’s why it’s so sad when films like “Akeelah and the Bee” misunderstand the phenomena of bees so thoroughly. Although many of the spelling bee contestants in the film are reduced to tears by spelling’s intense competition, the 11-year-old protagonist triumphs over adversity by becoming co-champion of the National Spelling Bee.

She triumphs over adversity and the tough competition to become co-champion? Does Game Seven of the World Series end in a tie? Does “American Idol” end with a shared victory for prematurely-grey doughboy and his capped-tooth ingenue rival? There can only be one victor in a spelling bee. And the intense, all-American competition leading up to that victory is what viewers tuning into the real national bee tonight will be lucky enough to witness.