Dogwash

Sunny Hundal continues his descent into intellectual desperation with this petty (and petulant) but regrettably increasingly characteristic post on his Pickled Politics vehicle: Why can’t racist idiots at least learn English? And what is this example of racist idiocy that Sunny-ji brings to a breathlessly expectant world?

A spelling mistake on the BNP's Twitter feed.

In the "Bio" area of the sidebar, someone has written 'Britian' in error for 'Britain'.

That's it. The killer revelation. The clincher. The conclusive shattering of the façade. The final, incontrovertible exposure of fascist knuckledraggery that will bring the precarious edifice of British Nazi faux respectability tumbling to the ground.

This is not even an obvious pig-ignorant solecism, as for example was this. It is as likely, if not indeed considerably more likely, to be a simple transposition typo. I don't know about the good folk of Pickled Politics, who join in Sunny's yah-boo-sucks glee with suitable gusto, but I make typos and inadvertent minor errors all the time, not all of which get picked up before publication. Having spent 25 years in the IT game, for example, the muscular memory in my typing fingers routinely turns 'serve' into 'server' and 'use' into 'user', and my habit of rephrasing a sentence as I am typing it can lead to unnoticed grammatical mismatches.

Proofreading doesn't always help as I tend to read the words I intended rather than the words which actually appear on the page and minor errors go unnoticed. In the work environment, it was always my practice to get a colleague to proofread the more important reports for this sort of minor error before final submission.

But for Sunny and his posse it's proof positive of imbecility and incompetence.

I'll say this. They may have made a rod for their own backs. Picking up on every minor typo, misspelling or grammatical infelicity in your political opponents' writings is a mug's game. It leaves you wide-open to counterattack in the same nitpicking vein. If the political Right descends en masse on Pickled Politics and Liberal Conspiracy to nitpick and ridicule every last minor error it would serve Sunny and his smug, patronizing little posse of cheerleaders and sympathizers entirely right.