Netizens can’t spell Brittany Murphy, spell it Brittney Murphy or Britney Murphy

I’m covering the death of Brittany Murphy here on True/Slant, and I noticed that the third most trending topic, after Clueless, is ‘Brittney Murphy.’ She may have been in Clueless, but most Twitter users are apparently ‘Spell-Less.’

Over on Google, it’s a little bit better. Brittany Murphy is on top, but ‘Britney Murphy’ is not far below it:

At least everyone is spelling ‘Murphy’ correctly.

Bing, meanwhile, won’t let us under the hood, but if you look down at the bottom of their homepage, you can see that Microsoft’s decision engine is still trying to decide on this morning’s news instead of this afternoon’s hot trending story:

A long long time ago in True/Slant history, I blogged about how most Americans would probably die of swine flu because they didn’t know how to spell it – they were Googling ‘Swine flue.’ Looks like it’s happening again. One nation, under G-d, with liberty and misspellings of proper nouns for all.