
Google’s breakdown of what Americans don’t know how to spell, state by state - happy-go-lucky
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/05/31/googles-breakdown-of-what-americans-dont-know-how-to-spell-state-by-state/
======
chasing
No, it's not a breakdown of what Americans don't know how to spell. It's
someone playing with Google auto-complete.

Google could actually do this study. They have a lot of good information at
their disposal. What words do people misspell the most often? Why?

But no. This nonsense instead. Which -- even though they say it's not
scientific -- people will look at and try to draw conclusions from, which will
shade ever so slightly how they view the world.

~~~
coldpie
Yeah, I was super disappointed. They even seem to be trying to make some
"southerners are dumb" jab since they color code based on misspelled word
length which just happens to create a big red cluster over the south. As if
word length is a strong indicator of spelling difficulty. Asking how to spell
"grey/gray" is a legitimately interesting question!

~~~
vinay427
I agree that the metric is awful for any reasonable interpretation that a
viewer would make. However, they managed to make Texas, Missouri, West
Virginia, and Connecticut stand out, with Oregon and Rhode Island being
coastal states that also fared poorly, so the possible conclusions about the
"south" from this map aren't obvious to me.

------
thewopr
This is a super misleading visualization. I caught wind of this yesterday and
started doing some digging. There are some broad issues with this.

1\. As others have mentioned, this is them playing with not true misspellings,
but the phrase "how to spell X". These are very different things.

2\. I don't believe these are actually the true "top searches" in each state.
They did some magic here to, I suspect, normalize for the most common of these
searches in the English language and then pick the most anomalous search.
Otherwise this viz would probably be very boring and just be filled with some
of the harder to spell English words.

3\. Further evidence this is based on "corrected rank" or something. Looking
at the state of Texas, the search for "how to spell beautiful" is much more
common than the search for "how to spell maintenance", which their viz claims
is the "top" search for Texas. Search for "Beautiful" makes much more sense
considering its frequency of use in the English language.

[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US-
TX&q=how%20t...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US-
TX&q=how%20to%20spell%20beautiful,how%20to%20spell%20maintenance)

4\. The original version that came out misspelled the word "ninety", which was
pretty humorous considering this will be used by thousands to talk about how
terrible it is that people can't spell and how autocorrect is ruining america,
etc etc.

Of course we should all be _shocked_ that a tweet was somehow unable to convey
nuance and detail of a quantitative analysis. /sarcasm

edit: The original source was a tweet:
[https://twitter.com/GoogleTrends/status/869624196921303040/p...](https://twitter.com/GoogleTrends/status/869624196921303040/photo/1)

~~~
cafard
In my younger days, it bothered me that "maintenance" should be so spelled,
since after all it it is related to "maintain". I got over it, apparently, for
I hadn't thought of that in years.

~~~
valbaca
It also doesn't help that "maintenance" is usually pronounced "maint-nense" in
the South, not broken out as "may-ten-ance"

------
Gaelan
Source link:
[https://twitter.com/GoogleTrends/status/869624196921303040/p...](https://twitter.com/GoogleTrends/status/869624196921303040/photo/1)

Mods, might want to change?

~~~
eduren
Yeah, no need for the article IMO

------
crazygringo
For the most part, this all looks so random that my gut tells me it's
statistical noise more than anything else.

The only likely "signals" I can detect are that "pneumonia" shows up 4x and
"beautiful" 4x as well, but there's no obvious correlation with the locations
themselves.

Now if the correlated the searches not by state, but by income level, years of
education, or age, _those_ might be genuinely interesting lists to look at.

~~~
LanceH
Rhode Island's word does have an 'r' at the end, so maybe that's real.

------
deelowe
Aren't "grey" and "gray" both correct?

~~~
davidsawyer
Yeah, as I Georgia resident, I will gladly accept that we "misspell" a word
that really has two acceptable spellings.

FWIW, I'm a fan of spelling it "gray". It just feels slightly more American
for some reason.

~~~
madcaptenor
People might have been wondering how to spell the name of Bob Gray, who ran to
replace Tom Price for Congress in Georgia's 6th district. (Or maybe I'm trying
too hard to find an explanation. You don't need to know how to spell someone's
name to vote for them.)

~~~
yesco
Maybe people just searched it because they were curious if his last name was
spelled in American English? Its a pretty big stretch but it's something I
could see myself doing since it would be kind of interesting if it was spelled
the British way.

------
sillysaurus3
Is anyone else in a similar situation? I grew up with Google and
spellcheckers, so there wasn't much reason for me to learn how to spell many
words precisely. Vocabulary yes, spelling, not so much. I find myself spelling
most words correctly, but there are some that I just let the spellchecker
handle.

I used to feel embarrassed about this, since the old pros never had the
benefit of spellcheckers, and would probably eschew them anyway. But from a
writer's standpoint, is it worth feeling embarrassed about, or is it a case of
technology enabling us to focus on more important things?

~~~
3minus1
I think spelling is like typing where you gradually improve. Even with a
spellchecker you still get a lot of practice typing words and seeing when they
are wrong.

------
dfar1
So... it looks like the US has a serious case of pneumonia.

~~~
maxerickson
There's a nagging respiratory infection going around Michigan.

It isn't pneumonia though.

------
novia
For those of you who are done with your free Wa-Po articles for this month
(like me), here's an alternate source:
[http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/article153524794.html](http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/article153524794.html)

------
Raphmedia
For the curious, the word that is cut off it: "How to spell
supercalifragilisticexpialidocious"

------
grabcocque
Keep up the good work, people of Wisconsin.

;)

------
peeters
Wouldn't it be a much more accurate measure to track the most commonly
occurring words in the "did you mean..." suggestions?

~~~
Jach
Maybe when the feature was first introduced but I wonder how many people
actively rely on it so that they can save time / be lazy. I do sometimes at
least. I can type "seahwsk schd" really fast (maybe I'll get the ks/sk in the
right order, maybe not, depends which hand or finger wins today), faster than
"Seahawks schedule" and know Google will figure it out. When Googling simple
stuff I frequently abuse the slight extra speed gain from not caring as much
about making sure the character order is always right, or from typing out just
the start of a word instead of the whole thing.

------
tehabe
Wisconsin in Wisconsin is a joke, right?

~~~
maxerickson
Wisconson is really easy to type.

(I mean that figuratively)

------
systematical
Transplanted to California, but definitely always let Google fix beautiful for
me. Starting to get the hang of it though at 32.

