Thursday, May 12, 2011

All those Amway "loosers"

Lynnea has been cleaning up my 15 year old Amway web page, and made a brief comment about the frequency of people who, in their hate mail to me, have misspelled the word "loser" as "looser." I've noticed this before and even mentioned it at the top of the site's guest book, because I don't see that particular typographical issue in many other places.

After some thought, I think I know why it comes up so often in this context. It's a unique meeting of three conditions:

  1. "Loser," while it seems like a simple enough word to me, has an unintuitive spelling in the sense that a single "o" makes the "oo" sound.
  2. People in written conversations don't use the word all that frequently. Amway people use it a lot because of the nature of the motivational material and how they're taught to regard those who criticize the group.
  3. Not to overgeneralize or anything, but it seems like a lot of them are pretty dumb.