This is not a defense of Vice President Dan Quayle’s infamous correction of that student spelling of “potato”...Or is it?
He was wrong...Or was he?
Potato is not spelled with an “e”...Or is it?
This is the same mistake a whole bunch of the people who were laughing at him would have made.
Personkind has gone through the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Age of Enlightenment, the Dark Ages and a bunch of Other Ages I could list, if I took the time to Google It.
Today we find ourselves in the Age of Unceasing Political Attack. If you make the slightest error, you are toast!
I’m not saying Dan Quayle is the American equivalent of Winston Churchill but allow you mind to wander with me for a Foolish Moment. The scene is the Conference to Find World Peace before We Blow All of Us to Smithereens Tomorrow.
The panel consists of the three smartest men who have ever lived and Foolishness...Or Is It joined the conference as the obviously disappointed moderator sums up the results of the conference with these words...
Ø Mr. Albert Genius the world appreciates your Herculean Efforts to save it but it is obvious that what you have proposed will not work in a thousand years much less will it work by tomorrow.
Ø Mr. Smartfella you are acknowledged by the entire world a the foremost expert on Foolishness and its fellow traveler Silliness. The world appreciates your getting serious in the face of tomorrow’s World Ending Calamity. We all agree that you are one smart fella and you are probably smarter that Mr. Albert Genius but your plan to save the world is also definitely unworkable.
Ø Mr. Dan Quayle, the world owes you a Gargantuan Thank You for the plan you have presented here today. We all agree that there is no way your plan will not work and, if it were implemented, it is certain to save the world from destruction. However, since you can’t spell “potato”, we are hereby rejecting your Plan of Certain Prevention and we have decided that we are just going to resign ourselves to the reality that tomorrow is the End of the World.
It was nice knowing you.
Would I kid u?
Smartfella
A Very Long Lagniappe:
Oxford Dictionary
Spelling potato ‘potatoe’
In the modern era, no gaffe of the spoken word quite reaches the heights of Dan Quayle’s misspelling of a certain tuber. And it also occasioned one of the most unfair responses; Dan Quayle got a bad rap (for potato, at least).
Potato P-O-T-A-T-O Potato
In June of 1992 Quayle was still the vice-president of George H. W. Bush, and as vice-presidents often find themselves performing tasks that no one else wants to do, he was officiating at a spelling bee. 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.
The vice-president averred that the correct spelling had an –e at the end, a statement which engendered no small amount of ridicule. In fact, he is still being mocked for it to this day. 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. Isn’t it?
Not the only one
But 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. For example, the New York Times was still occasionally spelling potato with an –e in 1988. 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. Quayle may have misspelled the word, but in doing so perhaps he taught the rest of us how to not make his error.
It happens to the best of us
It has always seemed to me that there was an overreaction to this flub. 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).
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 NYT, here Washington Post, and here The Oregonian). 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”.
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