America's inability to spell

Google searches offer a revealing look at how America spells. It's not pretty.

Someone stumbled across my blog early this morning with the following Google search:

minisotta vikings attendence

At face value, I didn't think much of it. Then I saw the location of the IP address: Colgate University.

Colgate University is located in central New York. U.S. News and World Report ranked it as the 19th best liberal arts college in the entire country in 2009. 93% of their student body was in the top 20% of their high school class and 79% were in the top 10%. The average high school GPA of students at this school is 3.73 with an average SAT score of 1397.

This place is cranking out smart people, right?

Maybe, but it looks like they've got some smart people who don't know how to spell.

Twitter is perhaps the best examples of America's spelling problem, and I'm not talking about "LOL" or "LMAO." Anytime Brett Favre makes the news, "Farve" becomes a trending topic. When Vikings interim coach Leslie Frazier coached his first game the other day, local TV station Fox 9 Sports repeatedly referenced "Frasier" in their tweets. And this is for a guy who's been the Vikings' assistant head coach for 2 years prior to being named the interim head coach! You'd think someone whose full-time job is to follow people like that would know how to spell the guy's last name.

I know, there are bigger problems in the world than how "Minnesota" is spelled or whether someone knows "R before V except for in Favre." But I can still lament the fact that people don't know how to spell and in many cases don't care to change it.