It’s human to err, but tweet with caution

When Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end the conflict with Eritrea, lots of famous people sent out their good wishes and congratulations.  But one tweet that really caught everyone’s attention was that of Ivanka Trump’s.  It wasn’t so much her good wishes to the recipient but her spelling. She called the prize ‘the Noble Peace Prize’. It created a ruckus and went viral encouraging other tweeters to call her either careless or lacking in basic knowledge that the prize was named after Alfred Nobel.

In another tweet she called the UK United Kingston and not United Kingdom. Clearly that was a typo.

Twitter has its moments and it also gives everyone a chance to jump on every famous person who makes a spelling mistake when tweeting.  A prime target is the President of the United States, Donald Trump, who is an avid tweeter. Some follow him and those of us who do not end up seeing his tweets either in the news or when someone we follow retweets him. Sadly Trump’s tweets are often full of grammatical or spelling errors. The most recent example is when he tweeted out something about a ‘wirch’ hunt.  Ironically, it appears that ‘wirch’ is also the name of a US congressman but it also appears unintentional. There is, however, one word he did tweet out that no one has yet deciphered and that is ‘covfefe’. I think the tweet was swiftly deleted and replaced by what I think he really meant to say and that is ‘witch’ hunt.  

Unfortunately the thing about being on Twitter and being the most powerful man on the planet, merely deleting a tweet is largely pointless. If you’re that powerful then as soon as you tweet something,it will be picked up instantly by your followers and the media.  Moreover, if it contains errors, someone who is not a fan will take a screenshot of that tweet before it’s deleted and then tweet it out over and over again. That erroneous tweet will persist inspite of its corrected replacement.  

But in all fairness to the President, certain social media platforms do have a flaw. Some, like Twitter,  do not have an edit button.  Further, especially where Twitter is concerned, the 260-character limit forces us to be frugal with our sentences and to even misspell words on purpose. I do it all the time. I have to because of the limitations of having to write short sentences on some platforms.

I do, however, try not to make mistakes when I’m speaking. Other people do not and that’s largely because they think, or have been taught, that it is correct. But often it is not correct. I have noticed that even those who hold very high offices in the land make the same mistakes over and over again. You might describe this as my pet peeve but I assure you that it is not.  It’s about being correct when speaking and writing full sentences. Next time listen to someone important, educated and a native English speaker being interviewed on television.  It might be a politician, a writer or a philosopher. Almost all make the same mistake repeatedly. Let me now ask you a question. When do you use ‘that’ and when do you use ‘who’? It seems that the use of the latter has completely disappeared from the English language, unless one is asking ‘who is that? ‘or’ who are you?’

But there is a point in certain sentences when ‘who’ must be used because it is correct. For example, saying ‘these are the people that need you’ is incorrect.  It should say ‘these are the people who need you’. On the other hand if you say ‘these are the animals that need you’ the use of ‘that’ is actually correct. So the general rule of thumb for using ‘who’ is that if the subject of the sentence is a person or persons then ‘who’ is correct.

The same goes for ‘I’ and ‘we’. Rest assured that saying ‘you and me’ is sometimes correct as is saying ‘you and I’. It just depends upon the context in which it is being used.