As we all recover from our long weekends, I’m sad to say I come bearing bad news for the U.S. education system.
In honor of this being Spelling Bee Week, Google did us the honor (or the disservice, depending on your perspective) of sharing the top searches for “How to Spell” by state. Behold the results…
America's most misspelled words – it's #spellingbee week and we mapped top "how to spell" searches by state#dataviz pic.twitter.com/oHkRHj8Eku
— GoogleTrends (@GoogleTrends) May 30, 2017
No one (apart from Connecticut and West Virginia with supercalifragilisticexpialidocious) was a real winner on this map. Although, there was a clear loser. I’ll leave you to decide who that is (**cough**Wisconsin**cough**).
But as we approach our national competition for excellence in spelling, it’s quite clear that many of us could use a little help minding our own P’s and Q’s (literally).
So, in the time-honored tradition of English teachers (since the beginning of time, I’m pretty sure), maybe we could all take the time to “look it up.” I mean that in the “get a dictionary and use it” sense of the word. Because in this age of texts and Tweets, it’s really easy to Google, copy, and paste. It takes a second and will leave your brain just as quickly. So make your grade school teacher proud and look it up and learn it.
…bi-daily smile…