It’s OK when he says it.
I was just following a news report about some of the more ridiculous messages that went out on Twitter at the time of the January 6 riots when I saw one by a Republican congressman from South Carolina named Ralph Norman hysterically calling for Donald Trump to invoke “Marshall Law.”
I don’t want to play gotcha! with someone’s spelling on Twitter, but I was a little surprised that the commentator I was listening to admitted that they had to check to make sure “Marshall Law” was, in fact, wrong. Though I suppose it is an easy enough mistake to make. Just last month I reviewed Caroline Moorehead’s Mussolini’s Daughter, where the Badoglio government that came in after ousting Mussolini is said to have proclaimed “marshal law.” Even I had to wonder if this was a slip or intentional. Technically, Badoglio had held the rank of marshal in the Italian army before becoming prime minister. So did Moorehead make a mistake, or was saying marshal law a joke? I’m still not sure, but I think it was a slip that the editors didn’t catch.
There was also a comic book character named Marshal Law, created in the 1980s by Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill. I don’t know if it’s still going. And in 1996 there was a TV movie called Marshal Law about a tough U.S. Marshal played by Jimmy Smits. This kind of thing probably confuses people.
Just to be clear though: it’s martial law.
Alex Good 
I get it, but the grammar rules are different for texts and messaging, and I can see autocorrect playing a role. The messaging seems to be that ‘these dolts can’t even spell’ but that rather misses the point; that these elected representatives were willing to abuse their position. At some point, this will have to be taken seriously, but right now, many of those involved are skating…
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Oh, slipping up on Twitter is no biggy. The mistake in the book was more of a shock. But why would martial autocorrect as marshall? Marshall isn’t even a word.
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I guess autocorrect may include previous attempts to spell something and corrupt a dictionary. But this is like picking holes in the grammar of a random note. We need to stop being amused at the novelty of being threatened by banal idiots who cannot spell and maybe we should do something to stop this kind of mental behaviour. If one of the two central parties in the US was to be elected on the promise of scrapping democracy then you can cut and paste in the Democrats as being winners of every election for decades to come…
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Well, I agree there’s nothing funny about the sickness of the Trump party in the U.S. But I was just going off on language for today.
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Marshall Syndrome.
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I’m guessing that was discovered by somebody named Marshall. And it’s still a syndrome. It’s not the law!
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True.
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