The Constitution was written in only 118 days and was transcribed by a young man named Jacob Shallus. The purpose of the Constitution was to unify the United States in a way which the existing Articles of Confederation could not. Today, many people question the validity of a document written over 225 years ago. Though it has been altered since then, many critics question whether or not the Constitution is still relevant given the many changes which have occurred over the years. Some wonder, with the right changes, could some of the problems we have in the modern world be solved?
1. Each noun is capitalized, such as People, States, etc. This is a true nightmare, since only proper nouns should be capitalized. Does Mr. Shallus imply that all of the nouns used in the constitution are proper? Or perhaps he intended that none of the nouns should be proper, even those which were correctly capitalized. Either of those options are absurd, and this is clearly an error by our current standards. All of the improper nouns need to be in the correct, lowercase, form.
2. The state “Pennsylvania” is misspelled as “Pensylvania” on the list of states and signatures on the fourth page of the Constitution. This incorrect spelling is offensive to all those from PA and furthermore, ought to be changed immediately. Now a learned history scholar may note that the singular N spelling is also found on the Liberty Bell, and could deduce that perhaps that was the way one spells “Pennsylvania” in 1787, but alas, it is spelled with its correct number of "n"s in Article 1, section 2 of the Constitution, and therefore the spelling should be considered an error, and ought to be changed. Unless we want to change the name of Pennsylvania, whichever is more convenient.
3. The use of the contraction “it’s”, is grammatically incorrect in Article 1, section 10, as it should be the possessive spelling, “its”. The fact that such an egregious error as the improper use of a asterisk was allowed to occur in such an important document sickens me to my very core. In my humble opinion, it is time to correct this error by replacing the contraction with the possessive.
4. In the 17 amendment, section 1, as proposed by Congress, the use of the words “state legislatures” appears. This obvious mistake of the pluralization of "legislature" not only defies the fact that each state only has one government, but defiles the sanctity of correct pluralization, as it isn’t even correct in context grammatically. It is time we correct this nonsense to avoid further confusion by removing the superfluous "s".
I hope you enjoyed my short criticisms of our erroneous Constitution, if you have any of your own, I’m sure the comments section would be a great place to share your opinion. For more on the Constitution and its errors, see here.
