Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Why Spelling Matters: L. A. school district didn't notice capitalization error in terrorist threat

This is beautiful. The entire Los Angeles Unified School District shut down today because of an e-mail terrorism threat from someone who identified himself as a jihadist. But New York schools received the same threat and considered it a hoax.

Why? Because of a spelling error.

Here is NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, explaining one of the reasons New York decided not to close its schools:

Bratton said one reason authorities believed the email was a hoax was because the word Allah was not capitalized: "The language in the email would lead us to believe that this is not a jihadist initiative... That would be incredible to think that any jihadist would not spell Allah with a capital 'A.'"

So the literate police in New York noticed something that the semi-literate educators in L.A. missed, causing the huge West coast school district to lose a whole school day.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Blessed be Moe Hawmed

Anonymous said...

Literate, yes, but not necessarily wise given that pointing out the criterion informs our enemies. "We didn't find the threat to be credible," should've been sufficient. :/