Donlad's mispellings

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Dana Milbank, "Shoker! Rediculous chocker Trump attaks and dishoners English with ever-dummer spellings", Washington Post 2/7/2017:

The English language was unprepared for the attak. It was destined to loose. And, inevitably, it chocked.

The Trump White House on Monday night, attempting to demonstrate that the media had ignored terrorism, released a list of 78 “underreported” attacks. The list didn’t expose anything new about terrorist attacks, but it did reveal a previously underreported assault by the Trump administration on the conventions of written English.

Twenty-seven times, the White House memo misspelled “attacker” or “attackers” as “attaker” or “attakers.” San Bernardino lost its second “r.” “Denmark” became “Denmakr.”

Sounds like one of my LLOG posts before readers step in to help me out.

Still, you'd hope that the White House would have better staff work than this blog does. I'm a fast but inaccurate typist, and I've been known to make brainos as well as typos, and I'm a terrible proofreader who has a couple of other jobs besides preparing LLOG posts. And there's no safety net but you. (Well, Geoff Pullum fixes things from time to time.)

Donald Trump's tweets (I typed "Donlad" but actually caught that one, and recycled it into the title…) are apparently a similarly unfiltered stream. But the list of underreported attacks? Seems like the Trump Administration could afford to hire a copy editor. John McIntyre might have a few spare cycles, and he's right up the road in Baltimore.

 



25 Comments

  1. Tom S. Fox said,

    February 7, 2017 @ 7:39 pm

    https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5slh0b/white_house_releases_terror_attack_list_with_word/

    [(myl) The theme of the cited discussion is that the misspellings and typographical errors were introduced on purpose, to give critics something obvious to complain about, preventing them from noticing some deeper problems. This is described as "8 dimensional chess". It's not clear what deeper problems are thought to be hidden, but the orthographic problems haven't prevented some critics from documenting other problems, such as the fact that nearly all of the "underreported" attacks were in fact widely reported.]

  2. Donlad's mispellings • Zhi Chinese said,

    February 7, 2017 @ 8:13 pm

    […] Source: Language Donlad's mispellings […]

  3. Steve Morrison said,

    February 7, 2017 @ 8:55 pm

    Hm, “Don-lad Trump” sounds a bit like “John-boy Walton”!

  4. BillR said,

    February 7, 2017 @ 9:29 pm

    You'd think they could at least turn on spell-check.

  5. BillR said,

    February 7, 2017 @ 9:32 pm

    Although, given the NYT story about them meeting in the dark because they can't figure out how to turn on the lights in the cabinet room, maybe they haven't figured out the spell-check either.

  6. Anthony said,

    February 7, 2017 @ 10:56 pm

    The torch of the Grauniad has been passed to a new generation.

  7. J.W. Brewer said,

    February 7, 2017 @ 11:53 pm

    Note that Milbank's list of alleged Trump mispellings includes the supposedly "unorthodox" substitution of "judgement" for "judgment," which is not really an error so much as a variant (albeit apparently a more common one in the UK than in the US). It's admittedly unlikely that Trump knocked out the Clinton-bashing tweet in which he used that spelling while in the middle of browsing e.g. Douglas Burnham's "An Introduction to Kant's Critique of Judgement" (Edinburgh Univ. Pr. 2000). But is it also unlikely that Milbank even knows that neither-one-is-actually-wrong variants are a thing, versus assuming that whatever crappy rulebook the Washington Post's copy editors use to impose uniform house style is The Only Right Way? (And as to possible failure to use spellcheck, neither "judgment" nor "judgement" is displaying a squiggly red line underneath it as I draft this comment, so at least someone's software has been tweaked to avoid Only-Right-Wayism as to this particular word.)

  8. Guy said,

    February 8, 2017 @ 12:09 am

    Can I find the original memo on the internet somewhere? My brief Google failed me. Misspelling "attacker" as "attaker" twenty-seven times makes it sound like the author didn't just commit typos, but actually didn't know how to spell the word, unless the memo was longer than I expect. The next most obvious explanation is a broken "c" key.

  9. rootlesscosmo said,

    February 8, 2017 @ 12:26 am

    When Abner Klang, a character in Mark Harris' epistolary novel "Wake Up, Stupid", ends a joke with the line "In act all they do all the way to Cali ornia is cry and cry and uck and uck," the recipient writes back "Phix your typewriter, you phool."

  10. Owlmirror said,

    February 8, 2017 @ 12:40 am

    Kleerley, thee tyme pireod that M. Drumpf thyngs is the best is any time beefoar þe effeet elytes normaliced the fetichizashon ov oarthogrufy…

  11. mollymooly said,

    February 8, 2017 @ 7:49 am

    Misspelling "attacker" as "attaker" twenty-seven times makes it sound like the author didn't just commit typos, but actually didn't know how to spell the word. The next most obvious explanation is a broken "c" key.

    I have on occasion mistakenly clicked "add [incorrect spelling] to dictionary" instead of "replace with [correct spelling]", and then had to re-learn how to remove words from my personal dictionary. Perhaps the memo writer needs to do likewise for "attaker".

  12. Andrew (not the same one) said,

    February 8, 2017 @ 8:21 am

    'Judgement', in my experience, is now more or less universal in British English, though I wonder if this is a recent thing adopted in deliberate opposition to US usage, once it became widely known that 'judgment' was 'the American form'. (Compare the way use of '-ize' has declined in British English because it is seen as a nasty Americanism.)

    (My computer does put a squiggly line under 'judgment', for what it's worth.)

    I have seen it alleged, presumably by analogy with 'judgement', that 'arguement' is the British form, but this is wrong.

  13. RP said,

    February 8, 2017 @ 11:29 am

    Oxford Dictionaries Online says of UK usage: "In British English the normal spelling in general contexts is judgement. However, the spelling judgment is conventional in legal contexts".

    Indeed, the UK Supreme Court uses the spelling "judgment" ( https://www.supremecourt.uk/news/latest-judgments.html ).

  14. J.W. Brewer said,

    February 8, 2017 @ 12:21 pm

    However the google books corpus creates its "American English" and "British English" sub-corpora seems sloppy enough to me based on prior experience that it's not the best way of investigating Am v Br spelling differences. But I took a look at COCA, assuming that the BYU folks must have had some reasonable filter for American-ness when building their corpus. "Judgment" is overwhelmingly more common than "judgement" (17896 hits to 724) but OTOH the first page of hits for "judgment" look like they're mostly from respectably-edited sources. Indeed one such hit (didn't look past the first page) was from a news story published by Milbank's own employer the Washington Post. The story was about mortgage foreclosures in the DC metro area, and the word (used in the sort of court-specific context where "judgment" is supposedly still the BrEng standard per the comment above) was in a direct quote attributed to a lawyer affiliated with Legal Services of Northern Virginia.

  15. Chas Belov said,

    February 9, 2017 @ 3:25 am

    I have to honestly say I pronounce San Bernardino without the 2nd "r" (or at least mentally hear it that way, since I've never had cause to say it aloud) and almost certainly would have spelled it without the 2nd "r" had I had cause to write it before seeing this post.

    And I would guess I picked that up from hearing "Route 66." The Chuck Berry, Depeche Mode, Natalie Cole, Manhattan Transfer, and The Replacement versions all sound to me like they're saying "San Bernadino" without the 2nd "r." The Rolling Stones version seems to have the second "r."

    I'm a longtime northern Californian and would not be hearing southern California news broadcasts.

  16. Chas Belov said,

    February 9, 2017 @ 3:49 am

    Also apparently in the "San Bernadino" company (once I searched on the full title "(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66": Nat King Cole, Asleep at the Wheel, and composer Bobby Troup.

  17. Peter said,

    February 9, 2017 @ 4:15 am

    This feels a little too close to the disparagement of George Bush’s “nucular” and so on, which LL steered admirably clear of. It’s not exactly 8-dimensional chess, but it’s a distraction; and every time we pick on superficial points, it gives Trump’s defenders an easy opening to dismiss what we’re saying. Much better to stick to the errors of substance, which there are more than enough of…

  18. Catanea said,

    February 9, 2017 @ 5:28 am

    I remember being made to memorize: "Judgment, like the GM sign/Needs no e to make it rhyme."

  19. Robert said,

    February 9, 2017 @ 7:16 am

    Maybe the White House was referring to Paul Ryan's remarks about "makers and attakers."

  20. J.W. Brewer said,

    February 9, 2017 @ 7:46 am

    Chas Belov: that the second R in "San Bernardino" is not intuitive from the pronunciation makes the correct spelling just one of those arbitrary things you have to have learned along the way, and the very arbitrariness in turn makes knowing it more valuable as a piece of cultural capital in contexts where those who have devoted more rather than less of their lives-to-date to mastering such arbitrary facts get to feel morally superior vis-a-vis the sort of low-class knuckle-dragging losers who don't even know how to spell San Bernardino.

    (I don't know about that particular song, but there's a whole subset of Stones songs, usually the more country-flavored ones, where Jagger abandons his usual pronunciation to affect a pastiche of Hillbilly-American and, as is common with Brits trying to sound American, self-consciously makes himself be rhotic but gets the details wrong in an awkward-to-comical way. Then there's the old clipped/reduced alternative pronunciation "San Berdoo," which you can hear in e.g. the lyrics to CCR's "Tombstone Shadow." I don't know if that's still current and if so who uses it in what sort of sociolinguistic context.)

  21. Jerry Friedman said,

    February 9, 2017 @ 10:02 am

    Chas Belov: Since it's Febuary, I'll point out out the perogative of every American, from govenor on down, to leave out one "r" of two that are near each other. The suprise is that the missing one in "San Bernadino" is the second, but maybe that's because it's in the least stressed syllable. (If I were from the Northeast, I could say the stress matters more than the awder.)

    (The "r" that's omitted might have to be next to a consonant. You can't leave out either one in "rear", unless you're non-rhotic, or "rural", and I don't think most of us really say "terror" like "tare".)

  22. Michael Watts said,

    February 9, 2017 @ 1:53 pm

    You can't leave out either one in "rear", unless you're non-rhotic, or "rural", and I don't think most of us really say "terror" like "tare".

    On the other hand, there was a running joke on 30 Rock that one character had appeared in a movie named The Rural Juror and nobody else knew what movie she'd been in, since they couldn't understand when she said the name.

  23. Michael Watts said,

    February 9, 2017 @ 1:55 pm

    Similarly, I failed out of an elementary school spelling bee in New Mexico when I was asked to spell "whisper", spelled it W-H-I-S-P-E-R, and was told the spelling was W-H-I-S-P-E-R-E-R and the mistake was mine for not asking to have it used in a sentence.

  24. Michael Watts said,

    February 9, 2017 @ 1:59 pm

    Apologies for the chain of comments, but now that I think of it, that spelling bee occurred in Alburquerque, NM. (First 'r' not pronounced.)

  25. Jerry Friedman said,

    February 10, 2017 @ 11:07 am

    Not pronounced and not even written any more. As a resident of Española, I should have thought of that one. This article says it's not clear whether Alburquerque lost its first "r" before or after the Anglos showed up.

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