Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

I really love this piece, on spelling and queerness.

The word “queer,” as [Sara] Ahmed notes, comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *terkʷ-, meaning “turn” or “twist.” This, according to Ahmed, “gets translated into a sexual term, a term for a twisted sexuality that does not follow a ‘straight line,’ a sexuality that is bent and crooked.” Queer desire, she adds, “reaches objects that are not continuous with the line of normal sexual subjectivity.”

For this reason, it doesn’t seem like a coincidence to me that text interfaces indicate “incorrect” or “queer” words with wavy, squiggly, or discontinuous underlines. The exact design varies from one piece of software to the next, but the idea is the same. The “turned” and “twisted” line indicates the words that are “queer.” ... As an aside, I think it’s interesting that a fair etymological translation of the phrase tortured syntax in English might be something like “queer straightening up.”

...

Likewise, the squiggly line under a “misspelled” word is a trace. Sometimes a misspelling is primarily a record of a physical body: human fingers, at a particular moment in time, depressing buttons on a keyboard, following (successfully or unsuccessfully) a kind of score (in the form of a letter sequence). Sometimes a “misspelling” is the result of my linguistic subjectivity—say, the result of my having phonetically transcribed my own dialect. Misspellings are also records of social subjectivity: sometimes when the squiggly line shows up, it’s because I typed the word that I meant—like “transphobia”—even when that word names a concept that isn’t familiar to the culture around me.