Do
you struggle with spelling bees? Do you always seem to get “lose” and
“loose” mixed up? Would you recoil in terror if spell-check ever stopped
working? Fear not: You're in good company. From Nobel Prize winners to
the authors of great literary works, the inability to spell correctly
has plagued some of the most influential people in the history of our
species. Here are 11 of the most famous.
1. Jane Austen
Luckily, the author of
Emma and
Pride and Prejudice was always fortunate enough to find editors who could weed out her
various alphabetical mishaps. An early work, written when Austen was 15, was called
Love and Freindship.
2. George Washington
According to Richard Lerder in his book
More Anguished English,
the man who would become the first American president wrote “we find
our necessaties are not such as to require an immediate transportation
during the harvist"
while complaining about a supply shortage during the Revolutionary War.
3. Winston Churchill
Though he later became universally regarded as one of the
greatest orators of all time, one of Churchill's
early report cards said “Writing is good, but terribly slow—spelling about as bad as it well can be.”
4. Agatha Christie
“Writing and spelling were always terribly difficult for me... [I
was] an extraordinarily bad speller and have remained so until this
day.” It's incredible to think that this humbling statement came from
the pen of one of the greatest mystery authors of all time: a woman who
would later be celebrated as “The Queen of Crime."
Christie's dyslexia made accurate spelling difficult, and she'd occasionally even misspell the names of her own characters: in
An Appointment with Death, Colonel Carbury's name is later written as “Colonel Carbery.”
5. Andrew Jackson
Examples of Old Hickory's seemingly innumerable botched spelling
attempts include “devilopment,” the continent of “Urope," and performing
before a “larg” audience. This ineptitude even went on to become a
political punchline. His perennial political rival John Quincy Adams
once denounced him
as “a savage who can scarcely spell his own name.” Jackson's retort?
“It's a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word.”
6. Albert Einstein
In Einstein's defense, English was his second language. It's
therefore easy to understand why spelling and grammatical errors in his
works were a constant source of frustration to the physicist. “I cannot
write in English,”
he said, “because of the treacherous spelling.”
7. Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway seemed to have difficulty with present participles, as
“loving” became “loveing” and “moving” turned into “moveing” in his
manuscripts. Whenever an editor complained of these bloopers, however,
Hemingway would snap “Well, that's what you're hired to correct!”
8. F. Scott Fitzgerald
The original draft of
The Great Gatsby contained literally
hundreds of spelling mistakes, some of which are still confounding
editors. These include “yatch” (instead of “yacht”) and “apon” (instead
of “upon”). One of his most famous gaffes, which occurs toward the end
of the novel,
inspires debate to this day.
9. Olivia Clemens
The wife of Samuel Clemens—better known by his pen name “Mark
Twain—“Livy's” frequent compositional errors were an endless source of
amusement to her husband. After receiving one of her letters, in which
she miraculously made virtually no such bloopers, he wrote “Oh you
darling little speller!—you spelled 'terrible' right, this time. And I
won't have it—it is un-Livy-ish. Spell it wrong next time, for I love
everything that is like Livy.” Despite Samuel's playful jabs, he relied
upon his beloved wife as a “faithful, judicious, and painstaking editor”
until her death in 1904.
10. William Butler Yeats
According to biographer David A. Ross, “Yeats' spelling, indeed,
seems at times a matter of wildly errant guesswork.” Ouch. The great
Irish poet and senator's idiosyncratic writing style resulted in some
distinctively misspelled words cropping up throughout his works, such as
“feal” instead of “feel." Despite this Achilles' heel, Yeats won the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
11. Dan Quayle
No list of famously bad spellers would be complete without mentioning the 44th Vice President's infamous “
Potatoe Incident."
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