National Spelling Bee: Could you spell these 10 winning business words?

10. Logorrhea

Jacquelyn/AP
As Patrizzia Fox-Beaudet, 10, of Cottonwood, Calif., left, balances her placard from it's string, Vaidya Govindarajan, 14, of Miami yawns at center, as fellow spellers compete during the National Spelling Bee in Oxon Hill, Md., Wednesday, May 30, 2012. At right is Shruti Amin, 14, of Murrieta, Calif.

Year: 1999

Champion: Nupur Lala (Tampa, Fla.)

Definition: (n.) excessive talkativeness

Used in a Business page sentence: Some decried Greg Smith’s New York Times-published resignation letter from Goldman Sachs as mere logorrhea, while others saw it as a much-needed wake up call for a company with an integrity problem.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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