Nataly
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, Joinfo.com reports with reference to The Washington Post.
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:
“Post updated – our deepest apologizes for the earlier typo. — US Dept of Education (@usedgov) February 12, 2017″
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.”
Here are some of the Twitter reactions:
.@usedgov pic.twitter.com/5ZfvGibEx4
— TyreeBP (@TyreeBP) 12 февраля 2017 г.
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.
