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by lordlic 1724 days ago
I agree that there's not a single instance of double-spaces in the text, and I thought that was a really bizarre claim, but there are some instances of misspellings that help it along.

For example:

1. missles instead of missiles

2. carefull instead of careful

3. futher instead of further

But they're at least all consistent so there's plausible deniability that the author just didn't know English that well. And ofc the tweets are still on-point saying that it's an impressive and unappreciated feat.

3 comments

That makes it sound like the typo is made in just a few places to make the line fit.

Search missile, there are 0 results. Search missle and there are 217.

The consistent and plentiful usage makes me strongly believe it’s just how the author thought the word is spelt, not a cheap way to get their preferred formatting.

> they're at least all consistent so there's plausible deniability that the author just didn't know English that well
Sure but my disagreement was with

> help it along

Does it actually help them along if it’s that many items? It’s hard for me to imagine that 217 instances of a 6 letter word instead of a 7 letter word is much easier to format. My view is that trial and error, obsessively rewriting sentences to fit, is much more likely.

EDIT to clarify: what I mean is that I don’t think there was a master plan where words were misspelt to make this work. I think it’s rather brute forces with a lot of obsessive time and effort. Not in a bad way of course, I really enjoy what they did.

EDIT2: especially when rocket is already a 6 letter word, and likely could be used interchangeably in the guide. I feel that turning missile into one as well wouldn’t help the goal in the slightest, would only make it more difficult.

They're not just vowel removal abbreviations or similar though, they seem like things that'd be common errors - 'missles' is how a lot of Americans pronounce 'missiles', if her film and television is any indication, for example. 'Careful' is one of those 'eh what can I say, English spelling is weird' words anyway - 'care', 'full', why shouldn't it be 'carefull'? I'm not a teacher, but I bet that's a common error.
People were saying it was littered with double spaces and typos, rather than just a few instances, which is just incorrect