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I wish athiests would learn to spell atheist

2 May 2007
tags: , ,

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.

from → atheists, language and usage
11 Comments leave one →
  1. Aquoibon permalink
    2 May 2007 10:03 am

    I wish peepole woud stop thinking that pointing out speling mistakes is relevant. The meening is what maters.

    Reply
  2. Vincent Maher permalink
    2 May 2007 12:15 pm

    You’re so right…

    Reply
  3. Steve permalink*
    3 May 2007 4:01 pm

    But this post is about spelling, so spelling is relevant.

    Reply
  4. Roger Saner permalink
    5 May 2007 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.

    Reply
  5. Steve permalink*
    5 May 2007 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.

    Reply
  6. Aquoibon permalink
    7 May 2007 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.

    Reply
  7. Steve permalink*
    7 May 2007 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.

    Reply
  8. Charles Darwin permalink
    8 May 2007 3:02 pm

    I don’t believe in atheists.

    Reply
  9. Steve permalink*
    8 May 2007 6:03 pm

    What’s more to the point now is whether you believe in David Bullard.

    Reply
  10. prick in my rear permalink
    22 May 2007 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.

    Reply

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