Nieuws - 4 november 2010

WUR team wins Green Wageningen Dictation

Noblesse oblige. And so the WUR team calling themselves Drie Hoog Achter retained the title by winning the second Green Wageningen Dictation on Wednesday 3 November.

The five-strong WUR team led by science information officer Jan Niessen won the team competition, with an average of six mistakes. In second place came the Pantarijn secondary school with an average of more than seven mistakes. The individual competition was won by Pieter van Diepen from Leiden, who is practically a professional dictation contestant. He did not make a single mistake. In second place among individual contestants, and with just one mistake, was Piet Aben, the inspiration behind Resource's forerunner, the 'Wahobla'.

Van Rossem
The Green Wageningen Dictation is an initiative by the public library and the local Rotary club, and is held at the Hof van Wageningen hotel. It drew 160 contestants, who faced a fairly mild test of their spelling prowess, penned by the native Wageningen historian Maarten van Rossem and read out by politician Alexander Pechtold. The event raised 12,000 euros for the new hospice for Wageningen and Renkum.
Van Rossem's text reminisced about his youth, going back to the time when his father worked for the Plant Diseases service.  His thoroughly green dictation was not too difficult, and yet the contestants made twelve mistakes on average. The text was called 'Long live the arthropods' and was full of entomological terms.
If you are interested in testing your Dutch spelling, you can find the text here. Succes ermee!