Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

People are complicated. Love is not.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

I am pretty sure Katy Tur wasn’t always such a bootlicking sycophant.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

Bark louder, little dog.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

Everybody saw this coming.

“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

Fuck that bum, let’s go Joe!

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I Beg You

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I am the last person who should be commenting about spelling, because you can find a typo in almost every paragraph of every post on this site.

But for my sanity, will you people learn how to spell incompetent?

“The incompentense of this administration.”

“If we had a competant President.”

And so on and so on. Please. I beg you.

Reader Interactions

32Comments

  4. 4.

    Big Al

    Hay thar yuu have lots of reeders, wy ar yuu so worried abowt an occayshunal spelling of Incompetent, beter that than no reeders.

  5. 5.

    Marcus Wellby

    I am the last person who should be commenting about spelling, because you can find a typo in almost every paragraph of every post on this site.

    Ah, shouldn’t you post this under the Republican Hypocracy category? :)

  6. 6.

    capelza

    Profoundly bad typist, but I will try harder…I apologise for my past and future flubs here and now..can I blame my cat? She is either on my lap on on top of the IMac, with her tail aswishing across my screen…

    But I do spell in a mid-Atlantic way, long story…that’s not going to change.

  7. 7.

    CalDevil

    ppgaz’s point inspires a question: any blog software out there that has spell check for comments?

    I don’t recall ever seeing one.

    BTW, I plead bad typist too.

  8. 8.

    over it

    Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

  9. 9.

    Davebo

    That’s it!

    I’ve seen it all now.

    Oh yeah?? Well maybe Bush is a disaster, but you guys can’t spell worth a crap!

    Hey John.

    I know you are, but what am I?

  10. 10.

    docG

    Cut/paste comments into Word, spell check, repaste into comments section. Twenty or thirty seconds cleans my three fingered typing.

  12. 12.

    Narvy

    Download the google toolbar. It has a built in spell check.

    It also breaks some Windows programs (for me, it was Internet Explorer), apparently randomly. If you try the GT and start getting “terminated in an unusual way” messages, just remove the toolbar.

    John, while we’re being pedantic about spelling, could you please delete any post that contains”definately”?

  13. 13.

    John Cole

    John, while we’re being pedantic about spelling, could you please delete any post that contains”definately”?

    Given my typing, I am really not in any position to critique spelling on this site. It is just that my irony meter suffers irreparable damage when people launch broadsides on the ‘incompentance’ of Bush.

  17. 17.

    John S.

    Given my typing, I am really not in any position to critique spelling on this site.

    I get this mental image of John sitting on the virtual roadside with a sign that reads:

    Live in glass house — will throw stones

  18. 18.

    Narvy

    Nukular

    That should be spelled ‘nucular’. President Eisenhower pronounced it that way, too. Must be a Republican thing.

    One Pogo comic strip had Owl reading a book titled ‘Nuclear Physics’ and commenting “‘Tain’t so new and ’tain’t so clear.”

  19. 19.

    the friendly grizzly

    Narvy: repetence? I was thinking about getting another dog…

    Lazarus: A Vietnam veteran I know said he often wondered if it is was worse being in-country than incontinent…

  20. 20.

    SeesThroughIt

    John, it doesn’t get any better when you’re a copy editor by trade and can’t shut off the part of your brain responsible for copy editing and therefore correct spelling and grammar mistakes nonstop. Just browsing the web can be enough to cause conniptions. I mean, l33t-speak? Good gravy.

  21. 21.

    Narvy

    Speaking of editing, I once worked with a technical writer who had a sign on her wall reading
    “The urge to edit other people’s copy is stronger than the sex drive.”

  23. 23.

    Narvy

    I find it hard to believe any copy editor could read this site…

    Dude, that’s what they do. Why would a copy editor read a site where spelling and grammar were always correct?

  24. 24.

    Bob Munck

    Firefox has a plug-in to spell-check the contents of a text box. Maybe there’s some way to connect it to the Submit button such that the form isn’t transmitted until the spell checker runs. A tad of Javascript, perhaps. I’ll do some research.

    (Interesting. The Firefox spell checker flags both “Javascript” and … “Firefox.”)

  25. 25.

    summr

    Old entry from a word a day — looks like definately will be coming to a dictionary near you someday, just like miniscule :).

    A.Word.A.Day–invious
    X-Bonus: Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. -Immanuel Kant, philosopher (1724-1804)

    invious (IN-vi-uhs) adjective

    Pathless; untrodden; inaccessible.

    [From Latin invius, from in- (not) + via (road).]

    “If nothing can oppugn love
    And virtue invious ways can prove,
    What may he not confide to do
    That brings both love and virtue too?”
    Samuel Butler; Hudibras; 1662.

    Even though it can be caught by any run-of-the-mill spell-checker, “definately” is one of the most common misspellings around. Google shows millions of citations for it. It appears even in edited writing: in books and in newspaper and magazine articles.

    If this trend continues, some day this spelling will tiptoe its way into dictionaries as “miniscule” did. The original word was “minuscule”, from Latin minus (less). English language speakers erroneously believed the word came from the prefix mini- and began spelling it as miniscule. As this newer spelling grew in usage, it found a place in the dictionaries, first tagged as erroneous, and later simply as a variant spelling. The rising popularity of “definately” appears to be inspired by the sound rather than the meaning.

    Purists might agonize over the “decay” of the English language, but the best way to handle language change is this: be conservative in what you send and generous in what you accept. In other words, be punctilious in your own grammar and spelling, but overlook others’ solecisms.

    In this week’s AWAD, we feature five words that might trip us in another way. These are words that appear as misspellings even though they are genuine dictionary words.

    -Anu Garg
    (garg AT wordsmith.org)

  27. 27.

    summr

    Narvy Says:

    summr, this looks like language evolving. That can’t be, language is intelligently designed.

    That’s a good one :-).
    Fortunately, language is not “irreducibly complex” and does evolve.

  28. 28.

    tzs

    Sort of like how we now have both “inflammable” and “flammable”, “the latter supposedly due to the lack of people recognizing ‘in-‘ as an intensifier.” Paul Fussell, who has some wonderful swipes at the American use of the English language in his book “Class.”

    I flip out at the word “momentarily”, which the bloody airlines continue to use instead of “shortly” as opposed to “for a very small period of time.” Also have noticed a lot of “home” instead of “house” (probably usage invented by people in real estate for use in ads.)

    There’s also the U.K. vs. U.S. spelling thingie, which is why I end up triggering spellcheck programs all the time.

    Ah well, go read a bunch of medieval Latin and you’ll discover the same corruption from the original…

  29. 29.

    Vladi G

    People really ought to learn how to spell “hypocrisy” while they’re at it. It’s not “hypocracy”.

  30. 30.

    Narvy

    Democracy: Government by the people.

    Theocracy: Government by religious authority.

    Plutocracy: Government by the wealthy.

    Hypocracy: Government by hypocrites.

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