Ah Amercia, Land of the Free.

It amazes me just how effective a vector the Internet is for a) identifying interesting (and sometimes unintentionally hilarious) language faux pas and b) for taking such faux pas and just running with them. The latest example is Mitt Romney’s campaign ‘Make Amercia Better‘ which instantly spawned not only a dedicated hash tag (#amercia, generating a veritable hosepipe of tweets), but also a ‘With Mitt‘ app where users could change the background photo and overlay it with a photo of their own choosing (which ultimately led to a dedicated Tumblr blog where like-minded Amercians could show their commitment to Matt Romney’s cause).

And here’s the Google trend analytics for the word ‘Amercia’. Note the big blue spike on the far right of the graph? Yeah, that’s Romney’s doing.

– The Social Linguist