(Update: tweets corrected)
Education must not simply teach work – it must teach life. – W.E.B. DeBois pic.twitter.com/Re4cWkPSFA
— US Dept of Education (@usedgov) February 12, 2017
It’s not just the White House that seems to have a problem with spelling. Someone at the U.S. Education Department, now led by Secretary Betsy DeVos, does, too.
At 8:45 on Sunday morning, the department’s official Twitter account misspelled the name of W.E.B. Du Bois, a black sociologist, historian, civil rights activist and co-founder of the NAACP, the oldest civil rights organization in the United States. Du Bois was misspelled as DeBois — an error that might be understandable from a young student, but the U.S. Education Department?
Hours after the tweet was posted — and after the error was lampooned by a number of people on Twitter, it was corrected, with an apology:
Post updated – our deepest apologizes for the earlier typo. — US Dept of Education (@usedgov) February 12, 2017
The department fixed that tweet quickly, changing “apologizes” for “apologies.”
It wasn’t the first embarrassing spelling error of the young Trump administration. A recent White House list of 78 terrorist attacks that it said the media had deliberately “underreported” was riddled with errors, explained by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank like this:
The list didn’t expose anything new about terrorist attacks, but it did reveal a previously underreported assault by the Trump administration on the conventions of written English.
[Shoker! Rediculous chocker Trump attaks and dishoners English with ever-dummer spellings.]
Here are some of the Twitter reactions:
.@usedgov *W.E.B. Du Bois All good. Not like this is the official Twitter for the US Department of Education. 😒 — Ryan Wyatt (@Fwiz) February 12, 2017
.@usedgov pic.twitter.com/5ZfvGibEx4 — TyreeBP (@TyreeBP) February 12, 2017
@usedgov OMG, it’s DuBois. Who is in charge over there? … oh, wait, I get it. — Jennifer Morgan (@ProfJLMorgan) February 12, 2017
Earlier this month, Trump talked about black abolitionist Frederick Douglass as if he were still alive — at least if Trump’s tenses were to be taken literally:
“Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.”
Douglass, an African American social reformer and statesman, died Feb. 20, 1895.
[Trump implied Frederick Douglass was alive. The abolitionist’s family offered a ‘history lesson.’]
(Correcting time of tweet)