Google’s breakdown of what Americans don’t know how to spell, state by state | Hacker News Reader

Google’s breakdown of what Americans don’t know how to spell, state by state

washingtonpost.com

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.

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!

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.

Gotta say, I'm from South Carolina and I was pretty proud that we got "Chihuahua".

;)

Everything shades how we view the world. It's very difficult even for scientific work to truly influence the state of affairs. It sounds like this work was lighthearted, and there's a place for such work even among big cos.

As someone from Wesconson I have to say I'm appalled by this representation of my state!

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...

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...

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.

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

Source link: https://twitter.com/GoogleTrends/status/869624196921303040/p...

Mods, might want to change?

Yeah, no need for the article IMO

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.

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

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

Yes, it's more of a British English vs American English. Just like "favourite" and "favorite".

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.

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.)

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.

Gray is the American English spelling, more or less.

http://grammarist.com/spelling/gray-grey/

That one jumped out at me too. Particularly since, given the multiple spellings, entering "How to spell gray" (cf. just "gray") actually makes sense.

I often interchange between the two :)

I can never remember which I "use".

I finally sorted it out in my mind like so:

grAy: America

grEy: Europe

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?

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.

In most cases, being a poor speller isn't a big deal. That's what proofreading is for. It doesn't matter how you get to the correct spelling, as long as you do. You are human, and if you fight your nature instead of working with it, you're going to,have a bad time.

I used to be a great speller and pseudo grammar nazi, didn't really use the computer all that much until ~12 (and that's around when I was forced to learn touch typing), but IM, red-squiggle-underlined misspells and programmerisms like arbitrary prefix/suffix application or excessive hyphenation and parentheticals helped a lot to ruin it. But I'd wager I'd still fair better than average in a spelling bee...

I'm not sure what percentage of words I mistype these days are due to laziness of not wanting to type the whole thing out (I've made some embarrassingly(?) sloppy google searches knowing that it would autocorrect to the right thing) or actual issues of misspelling (like missing the second 'r' just now in 'embarrassingly'). And of those actual issues like that, are they just from typing too fast and being too far ahead after noticing the squiggle to break my flow of thought and go back and correct right away or did I genuinely forgot how to spell the word and would fail it at a pop-spelling-bee? Maybe when I type a word I use an heuristic to tell my fingers how to proceed and get on to the next word, and that heuristic has certain pitfalls that might go away with focused drilling, whereas if I went slow (like doing it by hand) I'd get it right more often because I'm considering the individual characters. So now the question is just whether the fault was in the heuristic or the actual knowledge. I know sometimes it's the latter and sometimes I'll have to google what I think it is to get the correction (because my system spellcheck failed me I was off so much) but how often?

In the end I generally don't worry about it. I'll make an effort in certain situations, but even then my first draft might just leave a bunch of things uncorrected until I pass over it the second time where I fix mistakes, reword, etc. Accuracy, clarity, and concision all take extra time, and not having to immediately worry about spelling and being able to rely on computer tools to fix a lot of issues automatically is pretty convenient time-wise. I'm also grateful I can type fast because that means if I have a fixed amount of time to write something I can probably finish and do at least one revision in the same amount of time slower typists use to get through their first draft.

I had a Latin/English teacher who used to think poorly of published books with bad typos and other errors in them until she wrote a book and saw just how many things she missed, and the initial proofread from the editor missed, and even after some back-and-forth there still might be something wrong. Perfection is hard even with computer assistance, no need to feel embarrassed. So yeah, I'd just focus on more important things, like making something good that is clearly communicated. If readers understand, what's the problem? (Beefor thuh refformashion, u ceud stil interprit this... But I draw the line at using emojis in place of words...)

Another analogy would be some engineers seem to decline in their ability to do simple arithmetic as they increase in their ability to do advanced symbolic mathematics. I frequently come back to the first half of http://www.theodoregray.com/BrainRot/ and especially this excerpt: "To think that a modern human should be able to do everything that previous generations have been able to do, and also have any time left over to learn anything new, is basically insulting to all those previous generations, since it implies that they under-employed their intelligence."

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

There's a nagging respiratory infection going around Michigan.

It isn't pneumonia though.

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

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

Keep up the good work, people of Wisconsin.

;)

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

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.

Wisconsin in Wisconsin is a joke, right?

Wisconson is really easy to type.

(I mean that figuratively)

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

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