One of the most popular tags in the “life” section of Amatomu today was “athiest” [sic].
Typos are typos, but when they turn up in the top tags it’s something else.
2 May 2007...7:27 am
I wish athiests would learn to spell atheist
Jump to Comments
11 Comments
2 May 2007 at 10:03 am
I wish peepole woud stop thinking that pointing out speling mistakes is relevant. The meening is what maters.
2 May 2007 at 12:15 pm
You’re so right…
3 May 2007 at 4:01 pm
But this post is about spelling, so spelling is relevant.
5 May 2007 at 1:23 am
But of course if your tying to have a meeninful conversation and speling and gramatical errors are resplendent then the meens of your comunication gets in the way of what you are trying to cimunicate.
5 May 2007 at 3:35 am
If you do a Google search for “athiest”, it will say
Did you mean: atheist
But if you search for “atheist”, Google will not help you if what you were looking for was hidden away under “athiest”.
That’s the problem with spelling tags wrongly.
7 May 2007 at 9:46 am
Steve, the post is not about spelling mistakes, it’s about using the spelling mistake to attack a concept.
The core meaning of the post is :
- spelling mistakes are silly
- some atheists make spelling mistakes
- therefore atheism is silly
Ultimately, if you pushed the flawed logic further, any opinion voiced by someone who doesn’t master perfectly the language he’s communicating with should be discarded. I believe this logic makes dangerous assumptions, especially in a country where, for most people, English is a second or third language.
7 May 2007 at 5:02 pm
Aquoibon,
Using the same logic as you set out, your comment is asserting that that the moon is made of green cheese.
It’s quite respectable in this postmodern era to say that the reader determines the meaning of the text, so that’s fair enough. You can tell me what my text means, and disagree with it, and I can tell you what your text means, and disagree with it.
Nevertheless, spelling things wrongly is not a sign of silliness, much less that the idea that is spelt wrongly is silly. What I did say was that spelling things wrongly in tags makes them hard to find. That’s what I said. The rest is what you said, not what I said.
There are some ideas I think are silly, like some conspitracy theories. There are all kinds of ideas that have some silly people believing in them. There are ideas that have silly arguments made for them. But ideas are not responsible for the people that propagate them. And silly arguments do not necessarily make silly ideas. And atheists are not the only ones who make spelling mistakes. But when it appears in a tag cloud it is something else.
8 May 2007 at 3:02 pm
I don’t believe in atheists.
8 May 2007 at 6:03 pm
What’s more to the point now is whether you believe in David Bullard.
22 May 2007 at 8:28 am
[...] Amatomu statistics, the most popular post on this blog in the last 30 days was one with the title I wish athiests would learn to spell atheist. I found that rather strange. I commented on the spelling because it turned up that morning in big [...]
22 May 2007 at 9:23 am
Atheism is a non prophet organisation, Shame on fools that cannot spell, My problem is not spelling but my bhig fingers on the chinese keyboarsd.
Leave a Reply