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 Lederer 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 Churchills 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. Its 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. Christies dyslexia made accurate spelling difficult, and shed occasionally even misspell the names of her own characters: in An Appointment with Death, Colonel Carburys name is later written as Colonel Carbery. 5. Andrew Jackson Examples of Old Hickorys 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. Jacksons retort? Its a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word. 6. Albert Einstein In Einsteins defense, English was his second language. Its 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, thats what youre 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 Samuel Clemens — better known by his pen name Mark Twain — delighted in his wife Livys frequent compositional errors. 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 wont have it — it is un-Livy-ish. Spell it wrong next time, for I love everything that is like Livy. Despite Samuels 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 senators 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 Presidents infamous Potatoe Incident.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 02:54:35 +0000