The Scripps National Spelling Bee, the annual competition that challenges erudite children and teenagers to spell some of the most obscure entries in the dictionary, will begin its final round on Thursday.

Shivkumar is a big thinker, an erudite physician quick with an apt quotation, whose Westwood office is stacked with Sanskrit volumes of the Mahabharata alongside books about late Bruins basketball coach John Wooden.

Viewers enjoyed the dignified combination of MacNeil, who spoke in a clipped, erudite manner; and Lehrer, a Kansas native with a soft heartland drawl.

It was also an erudite and satirical parable of the Cold War, in which campuses of a divided university confronted each other in hostility and mutual deterrence.

Birth was Boston — not the erudite one but a namesake village in upstate New York.