Being A Wingnut Means: Never Having to Learn Spelling

One of the things that I've noticed about both blog posts and signs at political rallies is the frequency of misspelled words.

Here are a few scenes from the competing Occupy Amherst and Amherst Tea Party rallies in October.

I felt sorry for this poor student:

I tried (ever so gently) to point out that radicalism is no excuse for having failed to master seventh-grade spelling. In vain did I commend to her the advice of Lenin's wife, Krupskaya, Deputy People's Commissar of Education and Enlightenment:

The student . . .  must know how to use the dictionary and he must always have it handy by him; likewise, books of reference, encyclopaedias, etc.

For some reason, she did not get the point. Pity.

She should be storming a library, not the bastions of capitalism.


Still, it was the nutjob extremists who were by far the worst spellers (as well as thinkers).

It stands to reason: If you can't control your own spelling, you develop paranoid fears of conspiracies controlling the world.

This mistake was more intriguing:

You'd think that someone concerned about the lives of Muslims would take the trouble to learn how to spell the term correctly. I wondered: Could it be that he was actually a scholar, conversant with the classic "Musulman" and variants? Nah.

In the end, it turned out that this poor antisemite wasn't alone.

He was eventually joined by the lost soul who had haunted the September 11 commemorations in protest.

In September (above), she had been merely a phantom menace. Here, she became vocal and took on this dapper dude from the Tea Party:

"Satan's Spawn": always a good conversation-starter.