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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Source: www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2025/02/17

Sadly, it's only a temporary solution.

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Rereading the earliest 1950s Peanuts comics, I find it most interesting how bad many of them are. And that's not because the theme of each gag was often drenched in a deep, dark existential dread. That's not a bug, that's a feature of Charles Schulz's world. (For the best exploration of that topic, see: 3eanuts.com.)

No, the problem is a lack of characterization. It clearly took time, years, for Schulz to congeal the personalities of each of the strip's largely interchangeable characters into more realistic, relatable individuals that continue to strike such a chord with modern audiences three quarters of a century later.

Without good characterization, the strip above is just a child who can't stack blocks. That's not particularly funny. But in later years, conscientious and thoughtful Linus trying and failing to build a order out of chaos... that will always be Peanuts.

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I was this many years old when I learned that in 1952, there was a Dragnet newspaper comic strip.

You might say that doesn't look anything like Jack Webb, but I say it's the spitting imate of Joe Friday. Joe looks at his watch a lot.

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Yesterday the girls had their annual checkup and vaccines. July got a clean bill of health. Victoria, on the other hand, has a "raised dermal mass on the skin below the commisure of the lips on the left side of the mandible," "gingival recession [on the] upper left second premolar... which is allowing thicker tartar to develop on the cranial root," and "mild crepitance palpable in her right knee." (My vet could have been in an episode of ER.) In layman's terms, Victoria is starting to get old.

I'll take this opportunity to notify my loyal readers that starting this month I'll be posting 3 poodle comic strips a month instead of 2. That's an extra 12 strips a year! (If Mom had her way, this blog would be nothing but poodle strips, but then where would I post about Batman or football?) I'll aim for posting a new strip every 10 days starting Friday, so pay attention.

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I was under the impression that someone was still producing new Henry comic strips. But when I looked it up, it turns out that no one has been making Henry strips since 2005, and the reprints I've been reading were probably drawn by Jack Liney prior to 1979! So the terrible comic strips taking up space in my local newspaper are probably older than I am!

Henry strips are essentially a one-panel gag mercilessly stre-e-e-etched across three columns. All they do is teach children that handicapped kids -- especially the mute and prematurely bald -- are deserving of all the scorn that they can muster.

How can defunct comic strips still in print be this bad? Why are they still printing them? Who, other than the blind, enjoys them? If we have to be subjected to reprints, can't we get old Calvin and Hobbes or Pogo strips instead? Even Mark Trail was better than this!

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Beginning in July, DC Comics is partnering with USA Today to present Superman comic strips reprinted from the upcoming Wednesday Comics limited-series. There is irony in the fact that DC is using newspapers to promote a comic featuring a character that was originally prepared for but rejected by newspapers. This irony seems to be lost on DC Comics which instead of promoting Superman's triumphant return to newspaper comics pages has been advertising Wednesday Comics as a 16-page "history-making" "newspaper-format" comic available direct to the public for a mere $3.99 per week! Buzzword Alert: "newspaper-format" means a folded, not stapled, comic book. Now compare that exciting offer to a standard modern comic book which has 2 staples, 22 pages, monthly issues, and a cover price of $2.99. No doubt this is test-market of a low production cost, high profit margin venture for DC disguised as a once-in-a-lifetime collectible opportunity. And therein lies a larger irony: that DC Comics may be turning to the tactics of an expiring newspaper industry to try and save an expiring comic book industry. If only the slide-rule and the 8-track cassette could have teamed up somehow, eh?

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