Its Impossible to Provide Service to People You Have Contempt For: Education Dept. misspells name of NAACP co-founder in tweet
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.