He-Whose-Name-Shall-Not-Be-Spelled-Consistently

Wednesday, 23 February 2011 | by Pat's Picks

What’s in a name? If you’re the long-time leader of Libya, at least 10 distinct ways to spell it. Every time Moammar Gadhafi starts to make the front pages, newspapers around the world engage in what seems to be a game to see how many spellings they can come up with.

Kaddafi. Ghaddafy. Quathafi.

Over the years, many people have opined on He-whose-name-shall-not-be-spelled-consistently. In a 1986 column, linguist extraordinaire William Safire suggested that the confusion stems from where you place your tongue. To make the hard guttural sound for a “g” you have to place your tongue further back in the mouth. “K” and “q” versions require less thrust.

Part of the confusion could be due to a general switch in Middle Eastern scholarly circles during the decades of Gadhafi’s tenure with “k” falling out of fashion for “q.” Who knows. The Library of Congress has 32 official versions on record. A couple years back ABC came up with 112 plausible versions.

Many newspapers (and Pat’s Papers) go with the AP Style, which is Gadhafi. But one thing I noted while scanning today’s front pages was that even when a paper runs an AP story, many times they change the spelling of Gadhafi’s name in the copy, seemingly at random. The Houston Chronicle, for example, printed the Washington Post’s story on Libya this morning. But instead of leaving the Post’s Gaddafi intact they changed it to Gadhafi. Similarly, I saw AP copy in one paper that had swapped in Qaddafi.

Scroll down to see the spectrum of spellings I plucked from today’s front pages and a great little ditty Safire was inspired to write:

The News says, Khadafy
The Times says, Qaddafi
Time says Gaddafi
Newsweek, Kaddafi;
MOO-a-mar
Mo-AH-mar;
LIB-ya
Lib-ee-a
Let’s blow the whole thing off.