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DeVos’s Education Department misspells name of NAACP co-founder in tweet — and the apology had a mistake

By
February 12, 2017 at 12:00 p.m. EST

(Update: tweets corrected)

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:

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.

Shoker! Rediculous chocker Trump attaks and dishoners English with ever-dummer spellings.

Here are some of the Twitter reactions:

Earlier this month, Trump talked about black abolitionist Frederick Douglass as if he were still alive — at least if Trump’s tenses were to be taken literally:

“Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.”

Douglass, an African American social reformer and statesman, died Feb. 20, 1895.

Trump implied Frederick Douglass was alive. The abolitionist’s family offered a ‘history lesson.’

(Correcting time of tweet)