MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow could barely hold it together when discussing Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s “A1″ gaffe.
At a panel on artificial intelligence in education on Tuesday, McMahon referred multiple times to “A1″—a popular steak sauce—instead of “AI.”
“I, myself, love me some A1,” Maddow said in genuine disbelief at how McMahon could have mispronounced a word that reads the same as it’s spelled.
“This is an anagram that you spell out!” the host said. “It’s not like NASA where you don’t say N-A-S-A, you just, like, pronounce the anagram as if it’s a word. This is the whole anagram spelled out. It’s artificial intelligence ‘A’ and then ‘I,’ ‘AI,’ and she cannot spell that!”
Though she mispronounced it several times, McMahon’s gaffe was made all the more extraordinary by the fact she used the correct term throughout the talk.
“There is a school system that is going to start making sure that first graders or even pre-Ks have A1 teaching every year starting that far down in the grades–and that’s just a wonderful thing,” McMahon said in one instance.
The irony of the education secretary struggling with elementary-level reading wasn’t lost on Maddow—nor was the fact that McMahon has been appointed for the sole purpose of dismantling her own department.
“So now we’ve got tangy salty A1 in all the schools, and that will somehow be facilitated by abolishing the U.S. Department of Education,” the host said. “You know, it’ll be delicious.”
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