Feeling bad about last year's Field Day, in which her slow running cost the relay team a victory, Nancy, who enjoys using fancy words, finds herself facing another Field Day and another relay race with a mean classmate.
Nancy is delighted that the new boy in her class is from Paris and sets out to become his friend, then discovers that this Parisian is not quite as fancy as she had thought.
When Sage's spelling and definition of a word reveal her misunderstanding of it to her classmates, she is at first embarrassed but then uses her mistake as inspiration for the vocabulary parade.