A member of the Flemish Parliament has tabled an emergency motion demanding a constitutional amendment to protect the correct spelling of the word “potato,” after autocorrect on his parliamentary laptop changed the word to “potatoe” in the middle of a televised speech on agricultural subsidy reform.
The MP, who represents a potato-growing constituency in West Flanders and has asked not to be named pending what he called “the full linguistic investigation,” was forty minutes into an impassioned address on the future of the early-crop Bintje when the chamber’s public display screen, fed by his laptop, silently appended an “e” to the word.
“No one noticed at first,” a fellow MP told this newspaper. “Then a journalist in the press gallery audibly gasped. Then the Green faction started laughing. Then the N-VA started laughing at the Greens laughing. Then the whole thing descended into a procedural dispute about whose autocorrect it was.”
“This is an attack on the Flemish soul”
In a statement issued later that afternoon, the MP described the incident as “an attack on the Flemish soul, on the dignity of the Bintje, and on the principle that a man’s word processor should not silently rewrite his speech about a tuber.”
The motion, co-signed by eleven MPs across three parties, calls for the correct spelling of “potato” to be enshrined in the Belgian Constitution under a new Article 11 ter, and for all government-issued software to be configured to accept only Flemish Dutch spellings of agricultural terms.
The francophone parties have objected, not to the spelling of “potato” (which they broadly agree is “pomme de terre,” though one PS member noted it was “not our problem”) but to the principle of putting agricultural vocabulary in the Constitution at all.
A constitutional precedent, and a warning
Constitutional scholars warned that the amendment, if passed, could open the door to further linguistic entrenchments. “Today it’s the potato,” said Prof. Margaux Devreker of the ULB. “Tomorrow it’s the mayonnaise. By autumn we will have enshrined the correct pronunciation of ‘Brussels’ and the country will collapse.”
The chamber is expected to debate the motion in September. The MP’s office has confirmed he will deliver his next speech, as a precaution, from handwritten notes.