Not everyone knows how to spell trouble ... "
Donald J. Trump
Liliputins. What the hell is it ?
http://www.stihi.ru/2012/08/18/5368
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spell trouble
To foreshadow future problems. I'm worried that these dark clouds will spell trouble for our day on the golf course.
See also: spell, trouble
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. © 2015 Farlex, Inc, all rights reserved.
spell trouble
to signify future trouble; to mean trouble. This letter that came today spells trouble. The sky looks angry and dark. That spells trouble.
See also: spell, trouble
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs. © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
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Trump’s spelling is so bad, online dictionaries are seeing an ‘unpresidented’ boost in traffic
by Eli Rosenberg
March 27 ;
Covfefe chaos: What Trump’s typos say about his administration
Misspelled tweets and press release typos are becoming the norm under President Trump, but critics say it points to a pervasive carelessness in the White House. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
Americans are taking note of President Trump’s habit of muddling words on his Twitter feed.
Every time Trump tweets a misspelling or misuses a word, there is a surge in dictionary searches for the “exact configuration” of the letters he used, according to data released by Dictionary.com. These searches indicate people are taking it upon themselves to fact-check the president in real time.
In one of his first tweets as president, Trump wrote he was “honered” to serve the country — a gaffe that sent searches for “honor” and “honer” surging thousands of percentage points over the previous week.
After the president accused Barack Obama of placing a “tapp” on his phones, searches for that word on the website spiked 46,000 percent.
Trump’s homophone mix-ups — using “council” instead of “counsel” or “heel” instead of “heal” — have also sent searches spiking.
Even the president’s trademark diminutives, like the one he used for “liddle” Bob Corker — once his preferred epithet for Sen. Marco Rubio during the primaries — have shown up.
[ Trump mistakenly tweeted that the country needs ‘to heel.’ The Internet gave him hell. ]
These searches are one example of how dictionaries with online search functions, such as Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster, have become an increasingly visible presence in the digital age as they are better able to track what people are searching for and publicize the results on social media. And they reflect how the Trump era and the rapid-fire news cycles it has inspired impact the massive flow of information every day online.
“People love telling other people that they are wrong on the Internet,” said Jane Solomon, a lexicographer at Dictionary.com. “And a dictionary can help you figure that out. Dictionaries are often used to settle debates.”
Lexicographers say that kind of fact-checking is just one of the many unpresidented, err … unprecedented ways that Trump’s presidency has boosted usage of dictionaries.
“You’re seeing a lot more engagement online with dictionaries. That’s very unusual — it’s not the SAT vocabulary words they’re looking up. They’re really tracking with the news in a really granular way,” said Kory Stamper, an author and, until two weeks ago, a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster. “It’s not just typos. It’s things like fact. People looked up ‘fact’ like mad last year to try and see if such a thing like an ‘alternative fact’ could exist. And you’re seeing people look up words like ‘collusion.’ Sometimes it’s because people don’t know what it means or also because it could be a word that Trump uses constantly.”
The social media managers of many dictionaries have happily played along, sharing the definition of words as subtweets — not-so-subtle nods meant to comment on current events.
In a world where objectivity is increasingly contested, dictionaries remain a trusted, neutral source of facts, used to glean the meaning of unknown words and confirm that words are used properly.
Stamper said the fact that searches spiked around Trump’s misspellings was a sign that people were looking up the words to confirm that they were wrong.
“You can tell when people look them up that they know that there’s something not quite right there,” she said. “People complain that nobody knows how to spell since the advent of spell check, but the fact that they spike indicates that there are a lot of people who know the difference between the different councils, for example.”
Many of the president’s verbal tics and phrases have become embedded in our culture — “sad!” — and in the larger sphere of global politics around the world, where officials, including some accused of significant atrocities, have cried “fake news” to try to defang reporting they don’t like.
[ President Trump cries ‘fake news’ and the world follows ]
Lauren Sliter, a spokeswoman for Dictionary.com, said she felt that Trump’s errors, however trivial they seemed, probably did have an effect on the national discourse.
“I do think it signals to some people that maybe we don’t need to be as careful [in] the ways we communicate in a public forum,” she said.
Data was not immediately available for Trump gaffes such as “hearby,” “Barrack” Obama, “payed,” and “enormously consensual presidency.”
But Stamper said she wasn’t worried about any damage to the English language inflicted by the misspellings and typos, as high-profile as they are.
“He does have a big microphone, but he is also just one man,” she said. “And the great thing about English is that it is a truly democratic institution — everyone who uses it has a say in where it goes. It is going to take much more than Donald Trump to add an extra p to tap.”
Eli Rosenberg is a reporter on The Washington Post's General Assignment team. He has worked at the New York Times and the New York Daily News. ; Follow @emrosenberg