{"id":16673,"date":"2009-09-17T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-09-17T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2009\/09\/17\/should-i-fix-the-spelling-in-the-united-states-constitution\/"},"modified":"2009-09-17T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-09-17T10:00:00","slug":"should-i-fix-the-spelling-in-the-united-states-constitution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20090917-00\/?p=16673","title":{"rendered":"Should I fix the spelling in the United States Constitution?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Commenter Dave jokingly remarked, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2007\/01\/05\/1416853.aspx#1417026\">I&#8217;ve grown used to handling characters with ASCII. (If it was good enough to represent every character in the US Constitution, it&#8217;s good enough for me.)<\/a>&#8221;\n But there&#8217;s a double-joke in there. You see, not every character in the United States Constitution can be represented in ASCII!\n If you <a href=\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/1\/19\/Constitution_Pg1of4_AC.jpg\"> take a close look<\/a>, you&#8217;ll see that some words appear to be &#8220;misspelled&#8221;: At the end of the second line, it says &#8220;<i>Ble&#383;sings<\/i> of Liberty&#8221;, and Article&nbsp;1 Section&nbsp;1 declares that &#8220;All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a <i>Congre&#383;s<\/i> of the United States.&#8221;\n That f-like character is actually a <a href=\"http:\/\/babelstone.blogspot.com\/2006\/06\/rules-for-long-s.html\"> long&nbsp;S<\/a>, a character which has fallen into disuse in modern English. It also doesn&#8217;t exist in ASCII.<\/p>\n<p> My friend <a href=\"http:\/\/theknittyprofessor.typepad.com\/blog\/\"> The Knitty Professor<\/a> told me a story of a class she taught many years ago. A student emailed a question: <\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"q\"><p> When I want to quote an excerpt from <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2007\/03\/07\/1825856.aspx\"> Locke<\/a> in my paper, should I fix the spelling? Some words use f instead of s, and others are <a href=\"http:\/\/ask.metafilter.com\/29691\/\"> incorrectly capitalized<\/a>. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> Today is Constitution Day, a United States holiday celebrating the United States Constitution. Since 2005, all educational institutions which receive federal funds must teach about the United States Constitution on this day, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/templates\/story\/story.php?storyId=5491931\"> even hairdresser schools<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Commenter Dave jokingly remarked, &#8220;I&#8217;ve grown used to handling characters with ASCII. (If it was good enough to represent every character in the US Constitution, it&#8217;s good enough for me.)&#8221; But there&#8217;s a double-joke in there. You see, not every character in the United States Constitution can be represented in ASCII! If you take a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103,26],"class_list":["post-16673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Commenter Dave jokingly remarked, &#8220;I&#8217;ve grown used to handling characters with ASCII. (If it was good enough to represent every character in the US Constitution, it&#8217;s good enough for me.)&#8221; But there&#8217;s a double-joke in there. You see, not every character in the United States Constitution can be represented in ASCII! If you take a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16673\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}