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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As a child of the 70s, I have long considered myself a Star Wars fan, which is why I impulsively decided to follow the link to "The Best Star Wars Trivia Quiz Questions to See How Much You Really Know" at Mental Floss dot com. The quiz has 100 questions, only the first 19 of which are in the category "Classic Trilogy (Episodes IV–VI)." But that's about where my fandom ends, so I figured I'd do pretty well. And I'm happy to report that I did know the name of Han Solo's ship and Luke Skywalker's trainer on Dagobah. But then I got to question 15.

15. What is the Emperor called in The Emperor Strikes Back?

I know I'm getting old, but I don't recall a movie named The Emperor Strikes Back in the "classic trilogy." And I certainly didn't know the answer.

Darth Sidious

Again, I'm old now, but I do remember a Darth Sidious who was the Sith Lord master of Darth Maul and later (after Maul gets cut in half) Darth Tyrannus and later (after Tyrannus gets decapitated) Darth Vader. (As Luke's trainer says of the Sith, "Always two there are. No more, no less." By which he clearly means a top half and a bottom half.) Darth Sidious was the evil alter ego of Sheev Palpatine, the representative of the planet Naboo in the Galactic Senate who manipulated events to rise to Supreme Chancellor before disbanding the Senate and ruling the galaxy as Emperor. So, yeah, Darth Sidious and the Emperor are the same person, but technically speaking, since Sidious wasn't introduced as a character until the fourth Star Wars movie, The Phantom Menace, no one called the Emperor that in any of the "classic trilogy" films, especially one that doesn't exist. (Point of fact: the prequels played so coy about Palpatine/Sidious's future as "The Emperor" that I have often wondered if Lucas expected contemporary audiences to be unaware they were all the same person.)

So I call bullshit. But what else should I expect from a piece of Internet clickbait in the post-truth culture in which we now live, where every major technology and media company has turned their content engines over to poorly curated supervised LLMs that "hallucinate" up to half their facts? The fault is clearly mine for expecting reality to live up to my fantasies of living in a more civilized age.

Happy May 4th to those who celebrate.

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Flower

I first heard of Phair in 1993 in the Mazda Miata with Mom during the afternoon rush hour commute between Emory University and Newnan when Phair's debut Exile in Guyville album was reviewed on NPR.

Thanks to the Internet, I can tell you that day must have been Tuesday, July 20,¹ when Ken Tucker reviewed Exile in Guyville, released in June 1993, for Terry Gross's Fresh Air. That was the summer before my freshman year at Emory, so what was I doing in the car? Was I working part-time in the Pediatric Infectious Diseases office with Mom before my work-study position started in August, or was I just killing time driving the convertible around downtown Atlanta while Mom was working? Could have been either.)

The Internet also makes it possible for me to transcribe Tucker's praise for this song in particular:

There's a thin quality to Exile in Guyville. It ends up making you think that Liz Phair is something of a dabbler, that If this rock thing doesn't work out, she'll take up painting or maybe just use her trust fund to live in Paris for a while. But there's a core of about four or five songs here that are really first rate, and one in particular, called "Flower," that I can't play on the radio but which is as fine and bold a song as I've heard about sexual obsession.

Obviously, I had to have any album with that kind of recommendation. I probably bought the cassette at the Tower Records behind Lennox Mall, and I recall playing it quite a bit during the long commutes between Atlanta and Newnan. Listening to Phair always made me feel rebellious and cool, as good rock music should. "I'll take you home and make you like it," indeed.

Thanks, Internet!

¹ The Internet tells me July 20, 1993², was the same day that the press box caught on fire at Atlanta Fulton County Stadium, which 90s Atlanta Braves fans will recall as the day that Fred "Crime Dog" McGriff made his debut for the team, in his third at-bat hitting a home run to drive in Ron Gant to tie the game at 5-5 in the 6th inning. The fire didn't start until 6, so I think we found out about the fire after we got home. The fire delayed the game start until after 9; I might have watched it, but I don't have any memory of that.

² You know what else happened on July 20, 1993? Some guy named Vince Foster committed suicide. And no one ever uttered his name again.

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Look, I love Benson Boone's "Mystical Magical" as much as the next guy, but after hearing it in every commercial break since ESPN's coverage of the U.S. Open used it for intro and outro bumpers in August through this week's NFL coverage, maybe there is such a thing as overexposure.

I'm not alone in thinking that. There is, Google assure me, a pretty sizable backlash to the rapid, overt commercialization of Mr. Boone's music. Selling out is fine in America; greed, not so much. The singer and his team are aware of this, and his music video for "Mr. Electric Blue" makes a good-natured joke of it by removing any hint of the hypocrisy that pollutes the modern zeitgeist. (Yes, despite being an old fogey who doesn't really care for music, I do watch music videos on YouTube as the Internet Gods intended. The old-school media's widely reported recent death of Music Television has been greatly exaggerated; music videos are not dead, linear television is.)

It's kind of a funny thing to say that you could hear any piece of music "too much." Despite the tendency of human beings (at least American human being) to resent the familiar, there are a bunch of songs I just never get tired of hearing. Back in the day when I was a waiter at Chili's, the chain played tapes of licensed music over and over until the entire wait staff would gather around the back office cassette player and argue over which tapes management was NOT allowed to play again that day. (No tapes were ever destroyed, but some were occasionally hidden. I hope they still haven't been found.) Despite the repetition, there was one song on those tapes that I could never get sick of. I bet you'd never guess that it was "Silly Love Songs" by Wings. Live and let die, indeed.

Several Paul McCartney songs, both with and without co-writer John Lennon, are high on my list of endless listening, which probably demonstrates that I have a high tolerance for what McCartney is interested in writing: the poppiest of pop music. Fizzy, friendly, sugary pop music. Overproduced sounds that have a good beat and you can dance to, lyrics that really shouldn't be thought about too hard. That's my jam. Music crafted to please the widest possible music-illiterate crowd, "Moonbeam ice cream" sort of stuff, like Dua Lipa, Katie Perry, Madonna, Michael Jackson, or, say, Olivia Newton John.

And please crowds they do. Why else would Madison Avenue adapt catchy tunes for advertising in Apple product ads or the memorable '90s Philips campaign that used the Beatles "Getting Better" (somehow always fading out just before the "it can't get no worse" refrain) or this year's sanitized-for-Christmas "Greased Lightnin'" (with zero creaming girls) or Target's 2025 commercials of their animated Get-Ready Yeti dancing to "Mystical Magical."

Okay, fine. I'm not sick of moonbeam ice cream just yet. 'Cause once you know, once you know...

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I'm starting to feel like a broken record, but the coming year has got to be better than the last, right?

The legacy of 2025 will be that of a time of transition. I have lived through the coming of cable television and the Internet and social media and smart phones and now AI and the loss of newspapers. More than ever, it feels like the billionaire-run corporations own us, body and soul. It certainly doesn't help that the elected head of our government, the man who is supposed to be a champion of the people, is shattering every cultural and economic norm he can reach.

Take heart that there are a lot of us feeling fed up right now. And, as always, the voices of history can provide some guidance in these troubling times:

Someday, somebody's gonna make you want to turn around and say goodbye. Until then, baby, are you going to let 'em hold you down and make you cry? Don't you know? Don't you know, things can change? Things will go your way if you hold on for one more day.

Can you hold on?

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In the Year of the Pandemic, 2020, "friend" Keith gifted me a copy of the video game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for PC. Keith likes it very, very much. I did not like either the first or second Witcher games, and after playing for a grand total of 6 hours, I decided I liked The Witcher 3 just as little. This is how I summed up that first experience for him back then:

So far there's only 1) a lot of talking with a bunch of characters who are all fucking assholes I want to kill (especially protagonist Geralt), and 2) me getting my ass handed to me (which isn't entirely unsatisfying because it means Gerald has died too).

Sounds like I had fun, no? But for various reasons, including a new and deep appreciation for another game from the same studio, Cyberpunk 2077, and the lingering doubt that I hadn't given it a fair enough shake the first time around, I decided I'd try Witcher 3 again on the Xbox this past week. My mistake. I made it a full 8 hours this time.

If you're unfamiliar, the game is 33% guiding your obtuse horse through bleak war-ravaged countryside modeled on the original Grimm brothers fairy tales (you know, the ones where witches pick their teeth with the bones of sugar-glazed abandoned children), 33% talking to assholes, and 33% being ambushed combat. I'll admit up front that even on the console I'm still bad at the combat. Very bad. Literally every type of enemy I have encountered in the game has killed me at least once. Some of them have killed me three, four, or more times. I'd finally had enough when the game sent me to a cave to be ambushed by a little goblin and his evil magic shadow... who together proceeded to kill me eight times in a row. With enough effort, I'm sure I could find the right tactics to eventually kill him (just like I eventually survived the mob of bandits who ambushed and killed me nine times in a row) and be rewarded with information on how to make killing him easier in future encounters. But I could get as much enjoyment from slamming my fingers in a car door, and I certainly don't look forward to whatever trick the game is planning to use to kill me next.

The only up side to this is that it appears to be a shared experience; if you Google reviews of this game, they will universally mention the lackluster and frustrating combat mechanics. That's definitely a feature, not a bug.

So if you're not supposed to play this "adventure" game for the killing, what's left? Those same reviews, including Keith's, universally applaud the storytelling. I cannot agree. Maybe I've never gotten deep enough into Geralt's quest to piss off everyone he meets, but I cannot buy in. Granted, this is a common Walter problem, especially with movies; I don't like spending any time with unpleasant characters. Does the story get great if I make it to the end? Sadly, like the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, I'll never know.

Related side note: The characters most relevant to the story are all physically attractive (compared to most NPCs, who look like lepers who bathe in pig shit). And the cutscenes are frequently constructed with a pornographer's eye for finding ways to show these attractive characters naked. (I've never seen so many bare breasts in a video game that wasn't specifically about bare breasts.) Therefore, I'm suspicious that many of these glowing story reviews are influenced by something other than shallow characterization and the repetitive "fetch quest" plotting.

Now, I've been playing video games since before the country's first pandemic (1981's "Pac-Man Fever") which means I've played a lot of games. Maybe I'm getting soft in my old age, but with so many games available, I don't understand why anyone would spend the time to get better at this one. Keith, I don't know who hurt you badly enough that you find this kind of torture entertaining (you do know that the Internet is full of naked tits on demand, right?), but I'm done with The Witcher no matter how many they make.

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I finally found a Christmas ornament I want.

Not to hang on a tree, mind you. There is no tree. There's never a tree. No, that one just needs to sit on my desk below my monitor where I can look at it often, nod, and sigh.

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Hannah, who last sent me questions in 2023, has broken her silence to write

"I was thinking about the post you made on May 17th, 2024, about taking your first COVID test. I remember thinking at the time that there can't be that many people left in the US who haven't taken a COVID test before, and I'm sure the number is even smaller a year later. I know a good chunk of people in the US say they haven't had COVID before (I only know two people who haven't had it) but I just think it's kind of wild that there are people out there who have never even tested for it."

For the record, I still haven't COVID (so far as I'm aware), so add me to your list, Hannah. And I haven't tested since that post in May 2024. But I agree with you, there really can't be many people in America who haven't been tested by now.

Nearly a billion tests had already been run in the US before widespread reporting ended in 2022. According to the CDC, the disease is still killing hundreds of people a week, so I assume testing remains widespread in medical facilities today. If you find someone who hasn't been tested in 2025, they're probably under 3 years old (although they do have tests for babies now, so even untested toddlers seem unlikely given how often rug rats get sick).

Hannah continues

"While I was looking for that post, I saw the one from January 24th, 2025. Why do you know that fact off the top of your head (that 10x more people in the US die every year from cattle than from sharks)? Do you peruse CDC data in your free time? Or did you hear it and then go to the CDC website to corroborate it? Or are you worried about getting killed by a cow? I'm just curious.

I'm flattered that anyone actually reads these posts thoroughly enough to criticize the sanity of my reading habits.

I know lots of facts off the top of my head. I should; I've been collecting them for almost 50 years. (I asked my parents for The Book of Lists for Christmas while I was still in elementary school.)

I'm pretty sure I first heard the cattle death statistic on Twitter, back when it was called Twitter and someone else owned it. And as I am prone to doing, I corroborated the basic veracity of what on the surface appeared to be an outlandish statement before repeating it. (I'm as gullible as the next Internet user, but I don't like repeating lies if I can help it.)

I do like to do research of that sort. Finding facts is fun, even when they run counter to my expectations. So, yeah, I've been known to deep dive in the CDC's data from time to time for giggles, just as I every once in a while wade through the Georgia Historic Newspaper archive when the mood strikes. Is that odd behavior? Doesn't seem so odd to me.

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39/2471. Alcatraz Island (1937)
According to IMDB, "This was the first film set in the prison on Alcatraz Island," and it spends a lot of time showing us how high-tech the prison was for its day. Otherwise, it's a pretty standard prison story.

40/2472. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
I got the feeling that everyone involved wanted to get together and make a Beetlejuice movie, they just weren't sure what the plot should be. It's quite a narrative mess, which is okay enough for those who relish Tim Burton's trademark take on horror. I admit that I was very much charmed by the unexpected climactic musical sequence built on Donna Summer's "MacArthur Park." (I assume the superior Richard Harris version was too slow to dance to?)

41/2473. Force of Arms (1951)
"Force of Arms" is not a great title for a hybrid "war is hell" romance mash-up. But William Holden is, as always, real good as the Joe struggling through his PTSD.

42/2474. The Case of the Black Cat (1936)
If you spend this entire Perry Mason movie waiting for the black cat to show up, you'll miss out on everything else: there is no black cat. It's actually the housekeeper's cat, and even then, it's mostly just a plot device to get Mr. Mason involved in the eventual court case.

43/2475. The Set-Up (1949)
This is a very, very good boxing movie that covers all the usual bases (love of the sport, gambling rings, corruption, long-term damage, etc.) that also manages to play out in real time. Recommended (assuming you can stand watching grown men hit one another in the face over and over).

44/2476. The Case of the Howling Dog (1934)
Perry Mason fans on the Internet say this is the best Perry Mason movie, and they might be right. I mean, at least this case has a howling dog. [Note: I watched this movie back in 2018 and had totally forgotten it. So that probably tells you how memorable it really is.)

More to come.

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Right now, if you ask Google how to "define misspelled" (you know, as one does when they have doubts about whether they have spelled the commonly misspelled word "misspelled" with the appropriate numbers of es, ls, and ses), you'll get this:

If you're a pedantic bastard like me, you may have noticed that the past tense is given as "misspelled" (as expected) but the past tense verb used in the example sentence is actually "misspelt," which is not among the variants listed for verb tenses. Did Google make a mistake? Obviously, further research was needed.

Although "spelt" has been listed as an alternative form of "spelled" since Noah Webster's very first 1806 A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language*, the word "misspelt" does not appear among the several hundred thousand words in my beloved 1977 Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary Unabridged, Second Edition. Nor does it appear now on the Merriam-Webster website. Therefore we can be pretty sure that "misspelt" isn't an English word, at least not in America.

Fortunately for everyone, Google does give its sources, and their dictionary is provided by Oxford Languages, which is an arm of the Oxford University Press which publishes the Oxford English Dictionary, the most highly esteemed dictionary of English English. Sure enough, those Brits have no Puritanical American qualms about unconventional spelling:

So what lesson, if any, can be drawn from this exercise? Is Google surreptitiously trying to force American to learn a foreign language? Are the British playing the long game to get Americans back for the War of 1812? All I know for sure is that it's harder than I thought to misspell "misspell."

* Technically, America's first dictionary spelled them "fpelled" and "fpelt" where the old-school long s was printed using the f letterform on the era's moveable type printing press. It's worth noting that Webster was considered an eccentric in his day for even attempting to standardize spelling. Even Shakespeare could have cared less about which letters went in which words. Per Love's Labor's Lost, act V, scene 1, lines 45-46 in the 1623 edition of the First Folio: "Yes, yes, he teaches boyes the Horne-booke: What is Ab speld backward with the horn on his head?"

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