you say potatoe...

How would you like to be remember by your dumbest mistake? It can be something small, something you did accidentally on one of those off-days you have, or it can be something big, something incredibly public and incredibly embarrassing. Well what if that was what people remembered you by?

Twenty years ago today, Vice President Dan Quayle was officiating a spelling bee (yea VPs get all the important stuff), when he corrected a kid’s correct spelling of the word potato, by famously adding an e to the end of it. The public ridicule he receive for that was incredible, and to this day, anytime someone mentions the name Dan Quayle, people think potatoe. It's gotta suck to have an entire lifetime of achievements reduced down to being known as "that guy who can't spell potato". Even though he wasn’t the first to make that mistake (there were so many before him), but he did it so publicly and during an election year.

As a matter of fact, the good folks at the Oxford English Dictionary went back in history to check out people’s spelling of the word potato, and there are 64 different variations of spelling throughout history, including potatoe and even pertater. Even the NYT was using the potatoe variant as recently as 1988. Apparently, according to the OED folks, you’ll see the potatoe variant used up until June 15, 1992. Since that day, the only time someone uses the potatoe variant is in mocking reference to that day.

Well, I suppose at Dan Quayle's expense, the word potato will forever be spelled the right way now.