Spelling Nazis
Major Stake
These are the irritating, smug little memory robots that can't read an email or quickly jotted note without holding it up to dissertation standards. "ungh... It's 'i before e'* they'll say tout as if waving a turd on a stick in your face. Instead of reading for content, they jump on every slip of the keyboard so they can grandstand how 'smart' they are- how utterly brilliant- what a super genius they are for finding a spelling error. Good going, brainiac. You memorized a list of words or a few spelling conventions and now you're Einstein. Somehow they got it into their shallow minds that spelling is equal to intelligence.** No, spelling is equal to anal-ness and memory. If your spelling prowess was a sign of your high I.Q., then every time I wrote 'recieve' instead of 'receive' you wouldn't be stopped cold in your tracks whining " Ooooh 'recieve' I don't know what he means. That's not an English word, oooh." No. You'd be such a genius that you'd figure out I made a mistake and get on with your sad-ass life. The heads of these human spell checkers would probably explode if you doubled a letter when you shouldn't have. Now, I'm not a fan of rapper style spelling(e.g., boyz), but I'll read for information, humor, and emotion over mechanical form and over look the spelling infractions. I'm not going to be struck with apoplexy, I can figure out that somebody meant 'too' when they wrote 'to'. My brain won't freeze, I won't think that the person is an idiot, and I won't feel smugly superior to them. In fact, I probably wouldn't even notice at all. It would be an automatic correction and I'd go on reading what they had to say.
Yes, yes, yes, in professional writing where people are paid to catch these sort of things, it's such a ...hoot... to find a spelling mistake(yeah, a regular riot). In informal writing, though, such as quickly jotted notes, e-mails, and fan web sites.... Arrrggghhhhh!!!! Give it a rest you nazi! Instead of memorizing the arbitrary spellings of words, you should be memorizing the times and channels that Ghoul A Go-Go is on!
Minor Stake
A minor stake for being the same people that say 'between you and I', 'and also', say they feel 'nauseous', and never now when to use 'whom'.



*beige, cleidoic, codeine, conscience, deify, deity, deign, dreidel, eider, eight, either, feign, feint, feisty, foreign, forfeit, freight, gleization, gneiss, greige, greisen, heifer, heigh-ho, height, heinous, heir, heist, leitmotiv, neigh, neighbor, neither, peignoir, prescient, rein, science, seiche, seidel, seine, seismic, seize, sheik, society, sovereign, surfeit, teiid, veil, vein, weight, weir, weird,caffeine, casein, codeine, deil (Scots, devil), disseize, either, geisha, inveigle, keister (slang, buttocks), keister, leisure, monteith, neither, obeisance, phenolphthalein, phthalein, protein, seize, seizin, sheik, specie, species, teiid

**http://www.kedapublications.co.uk/stareway/matter.htm