So I just had a weird case of internet coincidence.

Where I work, we have presented a few talks by Mike Godwin, who is currently a research fellow at Yale University. Anyhow, I was trolling through some of our archives, saw his name and that led me to look up something-or-other related to him; I don’t think I found what I was looking for, but I did find a wikipedia entry about an adage – Godwin’s Law – that he coined in 1990.

The law states:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

My first reaction was, ‘Cmon, Bollocks!’ I’ve been on the nets for a looooooong time now, and while I can admit seeing a good number of discussions and threads break down to this language and verbal assaults, I can’t say it’s a predominant aspect of online threads.

Then, a few hours later, while I was doing some browsing about a kinetic tower being built in Dubai, and was skimming through the comments, Godwin’s Law approached one. There it was. Some user registered their name as ‘English Spelling Nazi’ and proceeded to instruct another user about proper spelling, for which they were actually wrong! It breaks down that there was a typo in the original article (innocent mistake); a commenter corrected the spelling in their comment, saying ‘It is spelt ‘Rhythm” and demanded wiki access to the article (rude gesture)- the word ‘spelt’ is the correct past-participle of spell in the English (i.e. British) language, in American English it would be ‘spelled’; as this person was already correcting another person on their English, ‘English Spelling Nazi’ stepped in only to embarrass themselves (stupid twat), for which another user highlighted them for their mistake (congratulations!). So an innocent mistake led to a rude gesture which led to a stupid twat, for which somebody was congratulated!

The internet sho is weird, idinit?

Related websites:
Mike Godwin keeps a blog by the same title as his internet adage.
Wired article by Mike Godwin.