As dumb as dog-shit at spelling correctly…

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

Shoker! Rediculous chocker Trump attaks and
dishoners English with ever-dummer spellings.

His carelessness with language is unpresidented.

By DANA MILBANK | 3:05PM EST - Tuesday, February 07, 2017


President Trump signs an executive order in the White House in Washington on February 3rd.
 — Photograph: Aude Guerrucci/Bloomberg News.

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 “under-reported” attacks. The list didn't expose anything new about terrorist attacks, but it did reveal a previously under-reported assault by the Trump administration on the conventions of written English.

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

I wish I could say this attack was unprecedented — or, as President Trump spells it, unpresidented. But I cannot say that. Nothing has distinguished Trump, his aides and his loyal supporters more than their shared struggle with spelling.

The morning after his inauguration, Trump tweeted: “I am honered to serve you, the great American People, as your 45th President of the United States!”

The honer is all ours, sir — just as it was exactly a year ago when you tweeted: “Every poll said I won the debate last night. Great honer!”

Soon after the latest honer boner, Trump received his first international visitor, the British prime minister, and the Trump White House, in its official schedule, spelled her name wrong not once and not twice but thrice. Theresa May became Teresa May. Britons noticed the gaffe, as well they would: Teresa May is the name of a British former soft-porn actress and busty nude model.

During the transition, Trump thundered on Twitter in a tweet that was so unpresidential it might be Freudian: “China steals United States Navy research drone in international waters — rips it out of water and takes it to China in unpresidented act.”

But what was really unprecedented was Trump's tweet on Hillary Clinton that included three mis-spellings in the space of 140 characters: “Hillary Clinton should not be given national security briefings in that she is a lose cannon with extraordinarily bad judgement & insticts.”

My insticts say Trump should enable auto-correct.

That might have prevented him from labeling Senator Marco Rubio (Republican-Florida) a “lightweight chocker” and “always a chocker” after the senator choked in a GOP presidential debate.

Trump's spelling chock was no shock. He attacked another primary opponent, Senator Ted Cruz (Republican-Texas), by tweeting: “Big shoker! People do not like Ted.”

It was no shoker, by contrast, that Trump also tweeted that Cruz “will loose big to Hillary.”

Again and again, Trump loosed his way. Ridiculous became “rediculous”, Phoenix became “Phoneix” (a felicitous phonics failure), and many paid attention when Trump proclaimed that he was not “bought and payed for”.

Trump let the sun set on basketball's Bobby Knight, knighting him “Bobby Night”. And he put Barack Obama into military housing with an extra “r,” turning the then-president into Barrack.

One might be tempted to say Trump's mis-spellings and those of his aides are evidence of a lack of education or an indication that they are not so bright. The constant barrage of mis-spelled invective on social media from Trump's most ardent supporters suggests the same (though this may be because they are Russian).

Such labeling is particularly tempting when Trump makes one of his mistakes in the process of insulting somebody else's intelligence — such as when he called MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell “one of the dummer people on television” or when he again used the unorthodox spelling of “judgement” in a tweet accusing Clinton of “stupidity”.

But such allegations would be the work of coastal elites who went to establishment institutions called “schools” where they studied elitist subjects such as “English”. In Trump's case, the trouble is likely not intelligence but his habitual sloppiness and recklessness. He apparently generates his executive orders with similar abandon (or perhaps that should be spelled a-Bannon). What I fear is that he will be equally careless with his foreign policy, giving little thought before, say, attacking Denmark.

If such an attack occurs, his request for a declaration of war practically writes itself. A proposed draft:

My Fellow Americans: You may be shoked by my military attak on the Kingdom of Denmakr. You may think it is rediculous and one of the dummer things I have done, and I admit it is unpresidented to bomb a peaceful nation. But my insticts and my judgement say we cannot afford to loose, for it would bring dishoner. And so we do not go gently into that good knight. We send our troops from their baracks until Denmakr’s aggressions are payed for. Only then will Copenhagen rise like the Phoneix. We will not falter, we will not fail — and we will not chock.

• Dana Milbank writes about political theater in the nation's capital. He joined The Washington Post as a political reporter in 2000.

__________________________________________________________________________

More on this and other Trump stories:

 • Trumpism is all tantrums, all the time

 • Richard Cohen: Trump is a boy's idea of a man

 • Congress has the power to obtain and release Trump's tax returns

 • Dana Milbank: The grizzly truth — Trump's competence problems are bigger than DeVos

 • VIDEO: White House blames media for under-reporting 78 terrorist attacks

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/shoker-rediculous-chocker-trump-attaks-and-dishoners-english-with-ever-dummer-spellings/2017/02/07/9556faf4-ed58-11e6-9662-6eedf1627882_story.html

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from the Los Angeles Times....

Spelling's not for eveyrone, Mr. Precedent

That's unprecidented.

By ALLAN FALLOW | 4:00AM PST - Monday, February 20, 2017


Mis-spelled words are highlighted in this photograph of a February 6th White House press release on terror attacks.
Time to make spellcheck great again. — Photograph: J. David Ake/Assoicated Press.

REMEMBER speling?

Neither does our president. In his first tweet as POTUS — posted at 11:57 a.m. on January 21st — @realDonaldTrump tweeted, “I am honered [sic] to serve you, the great American People, as your 45th President of the United States!” (He later deleted the message.)

He governs as he campaigned. As The Washington Post's Dana Milbank pointed out in a delicious evisceration headlined “Trump attaks and dishoners English”, Trump has managed to mangle gimmes like “shocker” (“shoker”) and “choker” (“chocker”), as well as second-round spelling-bee softballs such as “instincts” (“insticts”) and “unprecedented” (“unpresidented”).

Now all of Washington, perhaps inspired by the man at the helm, is swimming in a sea of typos.

“No dream is too big, no challenge is to [sic] great,” reads the inauguration poster recently removed from the online store of the Library of Congress.

On February 6th, the White House released a list of 78 terrorist attacks it claimed the media had under-reported. The list itself was tragically underconsonantalized: Attackers had become “attakers”, San Bernardino was allotted a single “r,” and Denmark got domesticated to “Denmakr”.

Six days later, the Department of Education tried to tweet an inspiring quote (“Education must not simply teach work — it must teach life”) by civil rights activist and historian W.E.B. Du Bois. Just one problem — or two, depending on how strictly you grade your students' papers: The Education mavens had spelled his last name “DeBois”. Four hours later came the predictable correction tweet: “Our deepest apologizes [sic] for the earlier typo.”

Does any of this matter? By devoting ink or pixels to the topic, don't we simply prove the populist point about out-of-touch coastal elites?

Once you stop laughing, some useful correctives emerge:

1). If you can't figure out the proper arrangement of 26 little letters, what does that say about your larger enterprise?

2). When you find yourself saddled with a slap-dash reputation, it's time to slow down.

3). Think before you speak. And definitely before you tweet.

As a copy editor at Time-Life Books in the early 1980s, I was made vividly aware that perpetrating — or merely perpetuating — a typo was a dismissible offense. That may sound harsh, but excellence in publishing extends all the way down to taking care that “minuscule” and “desiccate” are spelled in the quirky-but-correct way they demand. (This mind-set also explains why I never told my boss about those 2 million direct-mail brochures for Time-Life's Civil War series that went out with “Southern gentlewomen” rendered as “Southern gentilewomen”.)

Mis-spellings can be haunting even for non-celebrities. New York literary agent Lynn Johnston says she tries “to block the worst offenders from my mind — they're too painful.” She's talking about her own career-capping typos, mind you, not those committed by the writers she represents. As director of membership recruitment for the American Bar Association in the early 1990s, for example, Johnston oversaw the preparation of a marketing brochure intended to address “public lawyers”. Instead, Johnston rues to this day, “The ABA appeal went out to ‘pubic lawyers’.”

Henry Fuhrmann, the retired assistant managing editor for copy desks and standards for this newspaper, was in the middle of teaching a journalism class at USC when I reached him — via Twitter — so I couldn't tell whether haste or mortification inspired his curt answer to my query about erratacism: “Look,” he typed, “just google ‘Fuhrmann butt cracks’.”

I did. Assigned to shepherd into print a story containing the sentence “But cracks eventually appeared in Lamb's public persona,” Fuhrmann's copy desk experienced a conjunction dysfunction that yielded “the best typo to ever run in the Los Angeles Times,” as Tessa Stuart of L.A. Weekly dubbed it. (“It makes for a fun anecdote,” Fuhrmann later conceded. “In retrospect.”)

No one, evidently, is immune. And messages composed in the heat of the social-media moment routinely betray their spontaneity — I get that. But when you have 1.07 million Twitter followers and run a $69.4-billion federal agency with 4,400 employees — or let's say you have 25 million followers and run the country — you should probably hire a proof-reader to catch, at the very least, the obvious stuff.

Mr. Precedent, now that you've visited CIA HQ and reassured the spooks you have their backs, may I offer a reciprocal guarantee? The next time you're tempted to express yourself online, ask an intern to scan your Android screen before you press “Tweet”. Cultur comes from the top.

• Allan Fallow, who tweets as Conan the Grammarian, is a writer and editor in Alexandria, Virginia.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-fallow-misspellings-trump-20170220-story.html