I am soooo sick of people misspelling “atheist”.
Here’s my solution:
“athy” is hereby declared to be an adjective. If a thing is more athy than another thing, it is athier. If it is more athy then all other things, it is the athiest.
What, exactly, does this adjective mean? I propose that it be used to describe “the trait of being repulsed by homosexual sex”. There are a few reasons for this. One is that “homophobia” is overused hugely, and sheds more heat than light. Another is that most atheists are quick to defend gay sex as acceptable, and most fundamentalists would see disliking gay sex as a very positive trait.
In short, they need to learn to spell, to make this useful distinction.
This lets us eliminate the overuse of “homophobia”, create a useful word, and give people an incentive to learn to fucking spell.
Comments [archived]
From: Lory
Date: 2004-10-05 22:28:00 -0500
Oooh, I like that! Now for our next trick can we do something about the people who keep misspelling “rogue” as “rouge”? Or how about doing s’omething to apo’strophe’s s’o they go s’eriou’sly BANG when s’tuck in place’s they really oughtn’t to have been?
From: Goliath
Date: 2004-10-05 22:59:18 -0500
Curious…why would you care about how “atheist” is misspelled? You’re not one of us. You’re one of them. Remember?
I certainly don’t give a crap when someone misspels xian as “christain” (not that this is a common typo/misspelling, mind you…far less common than “athiest”).
From: seebs
Date: 2004-10-05 23:25:08 -0500
I care about misspellings because I’m a writer, and ALL misspellings bother me.
I’m afraid there’s not much we can do about people who misspell an existing word as a different existing word. Coining words helps some, though.
From: Ray
Date: 2004-10-09 16:35:43 -0500
Lory, with regards to the misuse of apostrophes, you might consider locking the culprits in an empty room and forcing them to read “Bob’s Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots” (http://www.angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif) until they recognize their errors and emerge as productive members of society.
From: Brian
Date: 2005-01-21 14:30:36 -0600
(not that this is a common typo/misspelling, mind you…far less common than “athiest”).
Interesting comment. I googled, just to see:
For athiest, i got 98,000 hits.
For christain, i got 241,000 hits.
The funny part? Both of them were predominantly (IAW my incredibly scientific 22 second survey) posted by christains.