Donald Trump Confuses Apostrophe With Hyphen, Misspells ‘Described’ In ‘Demented’ Attack Against ‘CNN’
In an early Friday morning Twitter rant that one journalist on Twitter labeled “plainly demented,” Donald Trump went after the network he called “Low Ratings CNN,” blasting the cable news channel for allegedly misreporting an earlier Trump Twitter attack against Democrat Adam Schiff.
But Trump’s anti-CNN tweet ended up drawing ridicule from other online commenters — not for his attack on the “LameStream Media,” — but for his apparent inability to distinguish between a hyphen and an apostrophe.
In an earlier tweet, Trump attacked Schiff by labeling the House Intelligence Committee Chair with the derisive moniker he has used for the Democrat on previous occasions, “Liddle’ Adam Schiff.” But when CNN quoted the tweet onscreen, apparently the network left off the apostrophe used by Trump at the end of “Liddle.” The omission seemed to enrage Trump — but he confused the apostrophe for another punctuation mark, as MediaIte reported.
“CNN purposely took the hyphen out and said I spelled the word little wrong,” Trump complained. While Trump’s use of “Liddle” for “Little” appears deliberate, Trump never used a hyphen after the word, but rather, an apostrophe.
In the same tweet, Trump griped that the situation was “never ending…with CNN!” But other Twitter users quickly pointed out that the phrase “never ending” does, in fact, require a hyphen. The correct rendering is “never-ending.”
To show you how dishonest the LameStream Media is, I used the word Liddle’, not Liddle, in discribing Corrupt Congressman Liddle’ Adam Schiff. Low ratings @CNN purposely took the hyphen out and said I spelled the word little wrong. A small but never ending situation with CNN!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 27, 2019
In the same tweet, Trump also misspelled the word “describing” as “discribing.”
But while journalist Brian Beutler took to his own Twitter account to describe Trump’s tweet as “plainly demented,” other responders saw a more ominous side to Trump’s attack on Schiff.
“It’s just a matter of time until Trump goes full anti-Semitic on Adam Schiff,” wrote SiriusXM radio host Dean Obeidallah, as quoted by the news site Raw Story. “I can assure it’s coming. And worst part is that many (not all) in his base would cheer such a vile attack.”
Another journalist, Brian Tyler Cohen, speculated that when future historians reflect on the final days prior to Trump’s impeachment, “they’re going to find this tweet complaining about a hyphen that is actually an apostrophe.”
Even the Merriam-Webster Dictionary felt the need to weigh in on Trump’s tweet, clarifying his use of punctuation.
For those looking up punctuation early on a Friday morning:
A hyphen is a mark – used to divide or to compound words.
An apostrophe is a mark ' used to indicate the omission of letters or figures.— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) September 27, 2019
In another series of tweets early Friday morning, Trump demanded that Schiff immediately resign from Congress, as The Inquisitr reported, over his reading of Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at Thursday’s nationally televised Intelligence Committee hearing.
In that reading, which Schiff later explained was intended as a “parody,” the California Democrat characterized Trump as a mafia boss. But Trump apparently did not get the joke, claiming that Schiff “lied to Congress and attempted to defraud the American Public.”
In Trump’s July 25 call with Zelensky, he appeared to strong-arm the Ukrainian leader, tying his demand for the “favor” of staging an investigation of his Democratic rival Joe Biden to Ukraine’s request for military aid in its ongoing war against a Russian invasion in the country’s eastern regions, as The Inquisitr reported.
