8/17/2023 0 Comments George bush vice president potato![]() The opinions and other information contained in OxfordWords blog posts and comments do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of Oxford University Press. Why is the former vice-president still being teased over his failure to spell a word on the spot, while the New York Times, Washington Post and others are escaping censure for routinely printing the plural incorrectly (spelling it without an –e)? (Examples of this can be found here, here, and here.) This improper spelling of ‘potatoes’ is so entrenched in our spelling brains, that what is needed is for one of the current presidential hopefuls to spell it improperly on television, so that the public can then publicly mock this failure, and in years to come we can say to each other “everyone knows that potatoes has an –e in it”. We all make such mistakes, obviously, and potato is a bit of a tricky word (the Oxford English Dictionary lists 64 variant spellings that have existed over the ages, including pittayatee, pertaayter, and pertater). I do not like broccoli, he said in 1990, and I haven’t liked it since I. ![]() It has always seemed to me that there was an overreaction to this flub. George H W Bush The elder Bush, the 41st US president, was fiercely anti-broccoli, banning it from Airforce One. Quayle may have misspelled the word, but in doing so perhaps he taught the rest of us how to not make his error. In fact, one can easily find spellings of potatoe all the way up to 15 June of 1992, at which point they suddenly drop off or become used in an ironic way, referencing this incident. For example, the New York Times was still occasionally spelling potato with an –e in 1988. Isn’t it?īut why do we know this so well? Is it perhaps because Quayle was so relentlessly excoriated that this particular spelling lesson has become learned on a national level? The spelling of potatoe, while not terribly common, existed for almost the entire 20th century. After all, the fact that ‘potato’ has no –e at the end of it is something that we all pride ourselves on knowing with every fiber of our being. In fact, he is still being mocked for it to this day. ![]() The vice-president averred that the correct spelling had an –e at the end, a statement which engendered no small amount of ridicule. There are various reports on whether he was reading a cue card with erroneous information supplied by the school, or made the mistake on his own, but what is incontrovertible (and posted on You Tube for posterity) is that Quayle incorrectly corrected a student’s spelling of potato. Bush, and as vice-presidents often find themselves performing tasks that no one else wants to do, he was officiating at a spelling bee. In June of 1992 Quayle was still the vice-president of George H. And it also occasioned one of the most unfair responses Dan Quayle got a bad rap (for potato, at least). In 1988, Quayle launched his quiet campaign to catch George Bush's attention. In the modern era, no gaffe of the spoken word quite reaches the heights of Dan Quayle’s misspelling of a certain tuber. It is unusual to lobby for the vice presidency, but that's what Quayle did.
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