It MAY. Could. Norms are to be broken if one wants improvement. How was Thomas Jefferson's spelling?
In the linked post,
@Jarod (addressed throughout the thread as
Brad) does not merely misspell. After “
unhenged natzi’s,” he says he does not care “one bit,” asks who made the rules and under what authority, then answers the de-facto-consensus explanation with: “
It MAY. Could. Norms are to be broken if one wants improvement. How was Thomas Jefferson’s spelling?”
That last move is the claim: willful departure from conventional orthography is either harmless or a virtue.
“Unhinged” → “
unhenged” and “Nazis” → “
natzi’s” are not improvements. They are ordinary errors, then doubled down on. “Norms are to be broken if one wants improvement” is a slogan that only applies if the break produces a better result. Here it produces less clarity.
The Jefferson analogy is also weak. The quip that Jefferson scorned people who could spell a word only one way is a
spurious quotation; Monticello finds no evidence he said it. What Jefferson did write to his daughter in 1783 was the opposite: never spell a word wrong; if unsure, use a dictionary. He had a few personal spellings (“
knolege,” “
recieve”) in an era when English spelling was still settling. That is not the same as a 21st-century lawyer announcing he does not care.
What can reasonably be inferred?
- He treats shared conventions as optional when they are inconvenient. Legal work is shared convention: statutory text, citation form, defined terms, grammar that keeps “not” from migrating, punctuation that changes meaning. A lawyer who publicly frames ordinary spelling as an authority problem he is free to ignore is advertising a posture, not a reform project.
- The defense is worse than the typos. Fast, sloppy forum typing is common. “I do not care” plus “who made the rules?” plus a false Jefferson shield is a refusal to distinguish informal haste from indifference to precision. In practice, that attitude is what produces sloppy captions, wrong record cites, and “close enough” briefing—not the typo itself.
- Credibility is the live issue. Judges, clerks, and opposing counsel discount writers who look careless. Clients do too. He is making a public statement that he does not value the small exactnesses the job sells. That fact reflects on his professional self-presentation.
- “It MAY. Could” is technically correct and practically empty. Yes: forum spelling may say nothing. The stronger inference comes from how he answers. A careful lawyer usually says “it’s a message board.” Brad said the norms themselves lack authority and should be broken. That is a comment on temperament toward rules that exist by custom—the same kind of rules that make legal English work.
Bottom line
Habitual, defiant sloppiness on a forum makes the idea that this does not reflect negatively on him harder to take at face value. The negative reflection is not “he can’t spell.” It is that when challenged, he chose contempt for the convention rather than a modest distinction between a political thread and a pleading. For a member of the Bar, that is a weaker professional look than he thinks it is; not because the Florida Bar grades orthography, but because the product he sells is precise language, and he just told a public audience he does not care about the most basic layer of it.
