Wanna be a wannabe?

Here is a gem from The Associated Press:

The Spice Girls wannabe stars again. Following a calculated publicity buildup, the original Girl Power group of the 1990s announced Thursday they had agreed to get together for 11 concerts around the world in December and January.

Bristle all you want at the attempt to write write the colloquial wanna be instead of want to be. (And yes, I did look it up, and I do understand that was the name of a song from the group.)

If there is a time to use wanna be instead of want to be (and for some this may be never), make sure not to let spell check fool you. A lot of spell check programs still mark wanna as a misspelling, so the program thinks it's the noun wannabe instead.

For the Spice Girls story, however, it added a funny twist. (Or was the writer poking fun at the group? We may never know.)