Microsoft tries to fix big glitch on Obama
For months, Barack Obama’s campaign has repeatedly, and not always successfully, tried to swat away references to Barack “Osama,” the mutating of the candidate’s name into the similar-sounding moniker of the world’s most-wanted terrorist.
Some of the mixups have been made accidentally (as when Sen. Ted Kennedy did it). Some have been made maliciously by Obama’s critics (as when Rush Limbaugh did it).
One mixup, with potentially vast effect, apparently belongs to the unintentional category and gained wide currency this week: The spell-checker in Microsoft’s Hotmail e-mail software recommends that users replace the word “Obama” with “Osama.”
