Constitutional Fun Fact 1

The US Constitution, our second form of government (after the Articles of Confederation), constitutes the rules of the political game. Although it is a short document of only about 4,500 words, its 4 pages of parchment are filled with amusing little nooks and crannies that are easy to overlook as we skim for the most well-known sections.

Sure, we all know about Article I, Section 8’s enumeration of Congressional powers, and who could forget the Fourth Amendment’s protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” but when was the last time you curled up with Article 3, Section 3’s definition of treason, or spent the afternoon with the Sixteenth Amendment, which authorizes a federal income tax?

In my series of Constitutional Fun Facts, we’ll explore some of these less well-known aspects of the US Constitution. Along the way, I hope we’ll find it’s a quirkier document than our civics teachers led us to believe.

And for our first Constitutional Fun Fact – Misspellings! (Which, by the way, is one of the most commonly misspelled words…)

There are two major misspellings in the US Constitution, but they are difficult to find. When looking for misspellings in the Constitution, people often point to the capitalization of certain words or the odd spelling of Congrefs (that’s Congress, to us), but these were correct to the English of the day. Following German grammar, nouns in English tended to be capitalized. The apparent f is “Congrefs,” “blefsings,” and elsewhere is just an older form of script. The first of two S’s was often written that way. Other spellings, like “defence” rather than “defense,” were simply British spellings. Even today, millions of English speakers around the world use the British, rather than American, spellings. In fact, your word processing software probably has a British English option for spellchecking – switch over to it, then try getting away with “defense!”

But after we factor out all that, two misspellings remain:

The first occurs in Article 1, Section 10, which states in part: “No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it’s inspection Laws.” Did you catch the error? They used the wrong “its!” I-T-apostrophe-S is the contraction of “it is,” whereas I-T-S is the genitive (possessive) case of “it.” Since the “it’s” is supposed to refer back to states, it should read “its” – no apostrophe. And that’s not an example of grammar changing over time – “it’s” was as incorrect in the 1780s as it is today.

The second misspelling comes right at the end of the original document – before the amendments were added. The people who signed the Constitution did so in groups by state. The seventh group to sign was the delegation from the state of Pennsylvania – which is spelled with only one N! Although Pennsylvania was sometimes spelled with one N (for instance, on the Liberty Bell), it was as wrong then as it is today. Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn, and “sylvania” refers to the Latin word for forest.

Whenever I write something about misspellings, I end up misspelling something, so even though I’ve proofread this post at least 5 times, I’m certain there is something misspelled in here. I’ll just consider than a bit of Constitutional karma, and take what’s coming to me.