Spelling Trouble

A German human resources consulting firm recently conducted a study which showed that good three-quarters of German managers applying for high-level positions submitted application letters and résumés along with a decent serving of spelling mistakes.

Having half-literate managers lead multi-million dollar companies is neither life threatening nor particularly alarming. Once they land their dream job, big shots hardly have to use their literary skills. They can delegate.

Some managers actually end up developing worry lines while standing in front of a mirror, practicing their executive, decision-making and responsibility-filled look. Once they realize they're beginning to look older, they get really worried and have their secretary order a whole line of energizing and wrinkle-removing avocado and papaya-based skin products. Or they check in into a week-long wellness retreat and look out for every possible opportunity to rub shoulders with celebrities.

Business managers, however, are not the only Germans having problems with their spelling.

Did they go to school?

The German magazine Focus Schule organized a spelling bee at an education fair in Cologne, which started on Friday. For that purpose, the magazine's staff inserted 28 mistakes into 26 lines of text -- one of those typical texts in which characters whistle world-famous Sonatas in A major and pretend they are dead for three-quarters of an hour, just to prove an orthographic point.

177 teachers attending the fair agreed to take the test and show off their knowledge of the complex rules of German orthography -- an intricate, Byzantine world of capital letters, punctuation signs and words that can, depending on the current mood of the orthographic authorities, hang out on their own, screaming independence, or join a gregarious, inseparable party of letters that stretches from here to infinity.

The result of the teachers' spelling bee was fascinating. One teacher managed to underline 28 words, but, unfortunately, all the words he underlined were actually spelled correctly. Teachers managed on the average to discover less than one-half of the spelling mistakes.

One doesn't have to be a college-aspiring, overachieving high school nerd to figure out that that was not exactly stellar performance. Teachers failing the spelling test, however, must sound like sweet music to German students who have had it up to their ears with spelling tests and who must have suspected all along that something was foul in the Teutonic kingdom of the spelling bee.