Merriam-Webster tweets a tease at Donald Trump
"Tease" is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as "to laugh at and criticize (someone) in a way that is either friendly and playful or cruel and unkind."
To use the word in a sentence: "On its Twitter account, Merriam Webster's dictionary teased GOP 2016 presidential nomination front-runner Donald Trump's Twitter feed for a number of misspellings."
Trump can now add one of the world's best-known English dictionaries to the list of those mocking him for Twitter misspellings, along with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who mercilessly savaged Trump on the trail this week.
On Friday, Merriam-Webster's Twitter account posted this:
honer: one that hones (https://t.co/76PlKG8PA6)
— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) February 26, 2016
leightweight: We have no. idea.
chocker: https://t.co/geeDMqiS4D https://t.co/2km86hZAVQ
The account was referring to a number of Trump's tweets from earlier in the week, in which he referred to Rubio as a "leightweight chocker" (sic) and one in which he said it was a "great honer" (sic) that online polls showed him winning the last GOP debate.
The tweets were deleted soon after Rubio started reading and mocking them on stage at a rally in Dallas. Acting more like a stand up comedian, Rubio deadpanned, "He must have found a foreign worker to do his own tweets," simultaneously referring to a New York Times story that revealed Mar-a-Lago, Trump's private Palm Beach club, showed a high proportion of foreign workers.
Merriam-Webster went on to use Trump's misadventures in spelling as a teaching moment, educating the linguistically interested about the appropriate uses of "home" and "hone."
'Home in' and 'Hone in' are both used, but 'Home in' does a better job of hitting the mark: https://t.co/yCWqroXE5x
— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) February 27, 2016