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Showing 1 - 10 of 612 posts found matching: comic strip

Saturday 30 May 2026

I don't think Confucius really said that

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Tuesday 26 May 2026

In anticipation of this week's National Spelling Bee (hooray!), a website I visit regularly, Language Log (languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu), has posted a list of "America's most misspelled words in 2026" as compiled by a website I have never visited, Unscramblerer (unscramblerer.com). The good news is that it's still just May, and there's plenty of time remaining before 2027 for us to get better at tomorrow, which, apparently, we love to put an extra m in. Americans are a generous people.

It seems the list was compiled by an Estonian, so it's mostly interesting as a lens for how outsiders interpret how Americans use our own language, at least as filtered through Google (the source of unscramblerer's data). For example, in their explainer, they call out the difficulty American spellers have with silent letters, giving the example of the "silent" c in schedule. As an American, I can definitely say that particular c isn't silent to us, though they're correct not to ask us to spell scissors. Unscramblerer also seem to think we struggle with color. Is this really a list of misspelled words in the King's English? We already knew British people talk funny, so it makes sense they would spell funny, too.

Even outside of those context clues, I'm not sure I have a great deal of faith in the rest of their list. Their "most common" misspelled were bougie (hooray, Marxism!), favorite, and through. The first is obviously already slang (though, again, in my experience, I've found it far more common in UK exports than native to the States), the second commonly drops the silent o when used in pidgin and comic strips, and even McDonald's prefers to drive thru. Granted, those are more fun than what I suspect remains the real worst offender: its / it's. I know the difference, yet its something I still type wrong all the time.

According to the list, the most commonly misspelled word in the state of Georgia (as in Oklahoma and Wyoming) was Chihuahua, which coincidentally happens to have been the question to the Daily Double answer "In Northern Mexico, a capital city, a state & a desert all have this name" in yesterday's episode of Jeopardy!. I'm pretty confident that I can spell that one (hooray, dogs!). I checked, and I have posted the word in three previous Wriphe.com blog posts in the past twenty-one years, so even if I have misspelled it, I've hardly done so commonly.

To be thorough (thourough? thorogh? Thoreau?), I double checked for Wriphe.com posts with common misspellings of Chihuahua and found none. However, Google tells me the most common misspelling is Chiwawa, and I'm quite sure I would never type such a thing intentionally. So if I misspelled it in here somewhere, which remains possible as spelling is not among my stronger suits and I can be very creative with my typos, it probably looks something more like Chihuahuah with a completely unnecessary extra h. As a generous American, I do so love to make things more complicated than they actually are.

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