With a name like Klaas Pruiksma, he must be an excellent speller.

The towheaded 11-year-old pupil at Montello School defeated myriad opponents in the Maine Spelling Bee Saturday with his Brobdingnagian lexicon. He vanquished the local spelling bee with “caribou” and “automaton,” and stung the state bee with “wasabi.”

Pruiksma, a sixth-grader, now heads to Washington, D.C., in May to compete for the title of nation’s most prodigious schoolboy speller. We wish him the best of luck, and offer him the following bit of advice, garnered from our experience in the (mis)spelling business:

Know your derivations. Latin, Greek and German might not be spoken much in Maine, but other tongues are the spinal column of English. A working knowledge of the foundations of our language is a key to good spelling. The folks at national spelling bees know this, as evidenced by words that secured the title for these past bee champions:

Pococurante – from Latin, meaning apathetic, or indifferent. Sal Gunturi, from Plano, Texas, wasn’t suffering from pococuranteism when he won the national bee in 2003.

Autocthonous – from Greek. David Scott Pilarski Tidmarsh, another champion spelling name from South Bend, Ind., used this seemingly alien word, that actually means indigenous animal or plant, to win the 2004 national bee.

Appogiatura – also from Latin, an operatic word defined as a single harmonic, dissonant and strong musical note that Anurag Kashyap (yet another champion spelling name) from Poway, Calif., played to win the Scripps-Howard national bee in 2005.

In 2006, the judges bucked their trend and delivered a German word – Ursprache – to the eventual winner, Katherine Close of Spring Lake, N.J. Ursprache is a “reconstructed, hypothetical, parent language,” which means the word defines something that really doesn’t exist. Talk about confusing a sixth-grader.

The idea makes our brains bubble as well, which is the joy of the spelling bee. It’s a competition where the kids can express their strength of mind, in an environment where displaying a little knowledge is heralded as a good thing.

In our culture, where athletic prowess of youth is most often feted, the tendency exists for intellectual pursuits to be given short shrift. There shouldn’t be a difference, as what Klaas Pruiksma has accomplished is equal to any of the accolades bestowed on Maine’s top youth athletic performers.

(Imagine if they were treated the same, with hardscrabble talent scouts scouring the local spelling bees for top prospects, to gauge words-per-minute speeds, vowel acumen, and alliterative intellect? Alas, more attention would probably still be paid to 40-yard-dash times, vertical leaps and the ever-elusive “intangibles.”)

We offer our congratulations to Klaas, and hope the best for him in Washington. Regardless of what happens from here, his achievement has taught Lewiston-Auburn the spelling of pride.