Two legs of the Triple Crown are in the books and American Pharoah is close to immortality, in more ways than one. Good thing spelling doesn’t count.
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God Help Us.
American Pharoah won the second leg of the Triple Crown over the weekend and thus continues to perpetuate the dumbing down of our society.
Over the history of the human race we have overcome misspellings and laughed in the face of illiteracy:
- Julius Caesar may have wanted world domination but everyone knew the cardinal rule, a before e only after c, well except maybe Brutus.
- Nietzsche championed the creative powers of the individual to strive beyond social, cultural, and moral contexts, but his biggest contribution may been the elusive five consonants in a row Wunderbar.
- Gandhi was a pacifist at heart but I am told if you spelled his name Ghandi instead of Gandhi, he’d slap the bread out of your hand.
- In the modern era, the psychedelics have conquered Phish and the sportsmen found ways to touchdown Brett Favre and dunk Dwyane Wade.
- Now though, the basic human skills we take for granted are in jeopardy.
The London-based Spelling Society recently came out with a study that two-thirds of us recognize spelling among adults is on the decline.
The President of the United States has been military housing (barrack), a biblical military commander (barak) and a world terrorist (osama). Barack Obama will go down as the most misspelled president in us history, that is of course if you discount our thirteenth president Millard Fillmore (not Willard Filmore).
It won’t get easier, Oxford’s dictionary continues to add words that look more and more like a toddler got a hold of a keyboard. LOL, ROTFL, BAE, SMH; are these words or did someone at Oxford have a seizure.
In three weeks, every editor in the world will be pulling for Dortmund, or Firing Line or any other horse.
The horse-racing world has been clamoring for a triple crown winner for 37 years. From Spectacular Bid to California Chrome, 13 horses have won the Kentucky Derby and The Preakness. All have fallen short in The Belmont Stakes, and all have done it without an English Professor raising an eyebrow. Now, every editor will be cheering against history. God forbid in big, black, bold letters is a typo on every website and newspaper from Seattle (Slew, 1977 Triple Crown winner) to (Sir, 1919 Triple Crown Winner) Barton College in North Carolina.
Now that would be ambarasing.
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Photo Credit: Patrick Semansky/AP
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