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Palace seeks improved spell-checking after ‘Norwegia’ gaffe

By Azer Parrocha

June 18, 2018, 5:02 pm

MANILA -- The recent blunder of the Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO) referring to Norway as “Norwegia” in a Facebook post has prompted the Palace to recommend an upgrade in the standard of “spell checkers” assigned in the agency to prevent further mistakes from happening.

Sana po talaga mas pataasin pa ang kanilang spell check dahil meron namang Word program na spell checker (I hope they improve their spell-check because there is a [Microsoft] Word program that checks spelling),” Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque said in a Palace briefing Monday.

Roque also said that he recognized where the frustration from the public, including journalists, on these errors were coming from as they had “higher standards” in terms of spelling and grammar.

Talagang mahirap po talaga I guess kung ikaw ay propesyunal na manunulat mas mataas talaga ang standards at naintindihan naman natin ang frustration ng taong-bayan but I can assure you na siguro naman po (I guess it’s difficult if you’re a professional writer and you have higher standards so I can understand the frustration coming from the public) but I can assure you that they will learn from this mistake again,” he added.

Roque acknowledged that the PCOO, led by Secretary Martin Andanar, has made several mistakes in the past, but stressed that the same mistakes could happen to any agency or person.

“Well, let he who has not erred cast the first stone. This may not be the first but come on, let’s give them slack,” Roque said.

Roque also assured that the PCOO will treat the “Norwegia” gaffe among others as an opportunity to learn.

“I’m sure po that they will learn again from this experience in the same way they have learned from their experience in the past,” Roque said.

On June 20, a PCOO post showed that President Rodrigo R. Duterte had conferred the Order of Sikatuna to outgoing Norwegian Ambassador Erik Forner for his service as the "representative of Norwegia.”

The word “Norwegia” was immediately corrected to “Norway”, but netizens quickly noticed the mistake.

PCOO Undersecretary for New Media Lorraine Badoy earlier dismissed the mistake as a “typo.” (With reports from Nicole De Leon, OJT/PNA)

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