Ahmed Gadhaf al-Dam, one of Colonel Gaddafi‘s top security official (sic) and cousin, left Wednesday evening, it was revealed, for Egypt, where he denounced Colonel Qaddafi‘s “grave violations to human rights.”
— The New York Times, February 26, 2011
By Joel Thurtell
Would I be asking too much if I pleaded with journalists and their parent organizations to agree on one spelling of Colonel ‘Qaddafi’ or ‘Gaddafi’ or ‘Kaddafi’?
The New York Times authors and editors who produced the paper’s February 26, 2011 front-page article, “Qaddafi Forces Violently Quell Capital Protest,” themselves were confused, using two different spellings (Gaddafi and Qaddafi) in a single sentence. By 6:10 a.m. on Saturday, February 26, Times editors had not corrected the mistake, which lingered in the online version of the story. They also had not fixed the singular-plural error.
Supposedly, there is no accepted way of transliterating Arabic words into English, and therefore we have a proliferation of English spellings, with the Library of Congress counting 72 variants and ABC News putting it at 112 forms. Even the colonel’s website spells his name different ways.
Hanging the blame on a website or linguistic ambiguity is no excuse for English-speaking writers and editors not to find a single spelling they can agree on.
Work on it, folks! This is not rocket science.
Personally, I’d reject “Gaddafi’ out of hand. The “g” sound is too soft.
“Qaddafi” and “Kaddafi” are at least harmonized in a harder sound.
Of the two, I prefer “Kaddafi,” because “k” has a hard sound both aurally and visually.
And as we know, the colonel is a hardass kind of guy.
Does my argument sound like a bunch of baloney?
Well, that’s what it is.
But I’m afraid any rationale for choosing one spelling over another will contain elements, if not great swamploads, of bullshit.
So be it.
We need an agreement.
When I told my wife about this column, she laughed: “Your second-grade teacher would be proud of you!”
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
