Twist and Shout

I just love Twisty Faster's blog "I Blame The Patriarchy": see, I've listed it over there to the left under the heading "Great Blogs", so obviously it must be a great blog. I also love her most recent posting, about the interview with Richard Dawkins in Salon yesterday. But here are three sentences from her posting that I do not, cannot, love, because they are sadly flawed:

I identify with the dude, and not just because I’m the biggest athiest in South Austin.

Scientists involved in the debate on behalf of evolution are aware that fundie godbags are only too eager to equate Darwinism with screwy bedeviled athiests, so they (the scientists) wish, for the sake of the argument against intelligent design, that Dawkins would just put a sock in it.

("Fundie godbags". Heh.)

In fact, although it is a felony in the US not to pretend to worship some sort of superhuman male deity, and athiests in particular are required to ‘respect’ everybody else’s ‘faith’, Dawkins — a Brit who is not constrained by parochial American superstition — comes right out and says what we’re all thinking: that religion is ‘evil’.

She's smart and she cannot possibly think that "atheist" is spelled "athiest". She has to know how to use a spell-checker, and she surely has to spell-check her writing before she posts it, so how could she not have caught that?

In fairness, I did the same thing last Hallowe'en when I accidentally wrote "All Hallow's Eve" for "All Hallows' Eve" about five times, and the spellchecker flagged it just now so it must have done so then, too, but I posted anyway and then a reader corrected me and I fixed it. Did I think I was smarter than the spellchecker was? (Sometimes I am, you know.) Did I just ignore it? Was I writing in such a frenzy of speed that the red flags just didn't register? (Highly unlikely.) Was I just having one of those days?

Also in fairness, it is very very easy to write "-iest" instead of "-eist": there are only a couple dozen words in English that end in the latter, but thousands upon thousands that end in the former, being as it is the superlative suffix for any adjective that ends in "-y", giving us such words as "Twistiest".

So I'm cutting Twisty all kinds of slack. This time.