Foriegn Spelling

Charles Foster Kane IV, former senator and current editor and publisher of the powerful daily newspaper New York Inquirer, writes:

My dear Grammer Genious,

I am resorting to your blog because it has been recommended to me by some very respected academic acquaintances in the Department of Rhetoric at Columbia University.

Here is my issue. The Islamic names and terms currently in the news are driving the copy editors and proofreaders of our newspaper crazy. How should we spell Mohammed, or Muhammad, or Mahomet, etc etc.? Is it to be Shiite, or Shite, or Shi’ite (they all sound vaguely vulgar, n’est pas?), and what in the world is a Sufi and a Wahhabi and a Mujahed and a Taliban and a Sunni, etc. etc.? It is monumentally confusing. I thought that we had put paid to this whole Arabic spelling issue when my grandfather helped the CIA to perform a secret lobotomy on Moammar Qadhafi back in ’89.

Please help us – we are at the end of our tether up here in the lofty, gleaming Inquirer Tower on Columbus Circle.

- Signed, Charles Foster Kane IV

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Dear Senator Kane,

Hey, I TOLD everybody not to ask me about speling! But I can adress your problem anyway. 

Mr. Kane, patriotic Americans don’t care about all that Arabic stuff. In fact, they don’t even want to hear about it, unless we’re, like, kicking their asses or something. So just leave it all out. You’ll sell more papers.

Glad to help.

While I’ve got you here, my Aunt Gladys that lives on 186^th near Metcalf in Queens says her paper has been late every day for almost two weeks now.  You got a new guy on the route, or something?

- The Grammer Genious