Compared with numerical mistakes, though, misspelling hogs attention. Mr. Obama once said that he had visited 57 states and had two more to go — and everyone but his craziest critics understood that he had simply had a brain fart. But when Dan Quayle thought “potato” was spelled “potatoe,” it was basically the end for him — proof that the vice president of the United States was a dim bulb.

In “Does Spelling Matter?” Simon Horobin, a professor of English at Magdalen College, Oxford, said people were not always this intractable about spelling. Standardized spelling in English came about because of a technological advance — the printing press, which created a greater need for a common way of rendering words.

Still, for much of the 18th and 19th centuries, spelling was often something that only typesetters thought about. People would generally use their own spellings in private letters and diaries. This was true even of presidents, some of whom were extremely careless about spelling. Abraham Lincoln, for instance, misspelled pretty much everything, including the names of Civil War battlefields (“Fort Sumpter” instead of “Sumter”); wrote “inaugural” as “inaugeral”; and confused “emancipation” and “immancipation.”

It was only in the 20th century, as spelling became a mainstay of the modern public education system, that the ability to memorize how certain words should be rendered began to take on extra social weight.

“Suddenly it became a badge of your education and status,” Mr. Horobin said. “It mistakes what good spelling is about. It’s essentially a memory test, an exercise in rote learning — but we now take it for so much more than that.”

Focusing on spelling blinds us to content.

Standardized spelling has been with English for at least a few hundred years, and it has mostly served us well. So I understand that the idea of abandoning it, or at least relaxing our adherence to it, may sound frightening, like the first step on a short march to civilizational decline.

At the very least, there’s the brown M & M argument for spelling — if someone spells well, it shows they have taken care to write something, in the same way that the rock band Van Halen would prohibit brown M & Ms in its concert rider as a way to test the attention to detail of its stage crew. That Mr. Trump and his staff often misspell is a sign that they may be careless about everything else.