The president-elect described China’s seizure of a US drone as an ‘unpresidented act’. But trouble with words doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t intelligent

The president-elect can’t spell. This is the least of our Donald Trump problems, but interesting nonetheless. The explanations that come to mind are that he is one of the following: a) careless; b) dyslexic; c) illiterate; or d) showings signs of dementia.

Regarding the ominous final suggestion, symptomatic misspelling is a primary test for failing wits. The future Potus will be, at 70, the oldest president to enter the White House. The Brezhnev years beckon.

Demographically, Trump is now in red-zone territory for what we prophylactically Latinise as “dementia”. It is now the leading cause of death in the UK. Perhaps it is less of a problem in the US.

Many of Trump’s tweets have been wildly misspelled, and he came up with a glorious macaronic on 17 December when he described the Chinese seizure of an unmanned US drone as an “unpresidented act”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trump’s latest public misspelling. Photograph: Twitter

This fuses, with James Joycean virtuosity, into a neologistic lexical alloy: first, it has never happened before; second, it won’t happen again after “Barrack” (as Trump misspells it – has he not read Obama’s birth certificate?) makes way for a real president.

Of course, paramount leaders need not be of spelling-bee-ace quality. Gordon Brown, in April 2009, wrote a handwritten, 70-word letter of apology to an aggrieved Nadine Dorries splattered with misspellings, including the addressee’s surname (“Dorres”), “politcal”, “knowlege”, “embarassment” and “advizer”. The letter also revealed that Brown has impenetrable handwriting, which is often used to cover for dyslexia; the odd guessed-at-but-wrong spelling can be tactically camouflaged. There is a lot of it about. Between 5% and 10% of the population do this, according to one report.

Want to know what it is like being dyslexic? Try spelling dyslexic backwards in five seconds. Personally, I don’t have any difficulty and I have worked out why: I can visualise words in my active and passive vocabulary printed out on a screen – usually in 25-point Times New Roman. Spelling backwards, right to left, is easy. Some of us, however, don’t have top-notch visual memory.

What has been proved is that there is no correlation between dyslexia and intelligence. In fact, Maryanne Wolf at Tufts University, whose lab investigates it, suggests that there may be an inverse relationship.

Wolf’s thesis is borne out by consolatory websites that inform people with dyslexia that they are not alone. F Scott Fitzgerald misspelled his friend’s name as Ernest Hemmingway. Hemingway himself couldn’t spell for nuts. Neither could Einstein. Even Shakespeare signed his name in at least six ways.

This is a serious issue. Why don’t we make a serious effort to rid our language of embedded archaeological debris? Spell it like it sounds. Why shouldn’t we write what we say – “guvment” instead of “government”?

It would save time educationally and spare pain (and demotion) to those who, however intensively they are taught, will never spell correctly.

I hope to God, for all of our sakes, that Trump is, indeed, dyslexic and not that other, awful D-word.