Mr. President: Make spellcheck great again

Grammar and spelling purists say frequent misspellings by the Trump administration are a bad look.

US President Donald J. Trump

File image of Donald Trump (AAP) Source: Bloomberg

Time to make spellcheck great again.

The mangled spellings that were a staple of Donald Trump's presidential campaign are flourishing in the White House.

It started on Trump's first full day in office, when he described himself as "honered" to serve as the 45th president, deleting and replacing it nine minutes later.

Trump's first presidential visit with a foreign leader was with British Prime Minister Theresa May in January.

The White House twice referred to her as "Teresa May" - who is a British porn star.

In February the White House released a list of 78 terrorist attacks that it said had been under-reported by the media.

The list misspelled "attaker" 27 times. San Bernardino came out "San Bernadino". Denmark came out "Denmakr".

On Monday, the White House referred to "Columbia" in a statement about a call with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos.

Aside from typos there is Trump's errant use of a hyphen in a Wednesday morning tweet in which he referred to "this Russian connection non-sense".

Just nitpicking? Does it really matter?

"It really goes to the heart of credibility," says Sue Burzynski Bullard, a board member at the American Copy Editors Society and a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "If you can't get basic spelling and grammar right, people start to wonder what else you got wrong.

"They need to slow down and edit themselves, or hire some editors."

But Jacques Bailly, the University of Vermont professor who runs the Scripps National Spelling Bee, isn't too bothered.

"Spelling is not unimportant, but there are a lot more important things, like how you use the words and the content of them."

But he says spellcheck would help a lot.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

While its spelling issues were far more limited, the Obama administration made mistakes. February came out as "Feburary" in 2015. And President Barack Obama memorably dropped an "E" in praising Aretha Franklin as the queen of soul in 2014 saying she "told us what R-S-P-E-C-T meant to her".


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Source: AAP



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