Forget Osama...

Want errant spelling in names?

What about Gaddafi? Is it "Qaddafi"? "Kadafi"? I swear, that name is found with more ways to spell it than any other I've encountered.

Speaking of this, I have a similar story to relate.

We were at work, in the dice pit, and our casino (like many now, I assume) has a large percentage of its employees that are Chinese. Many of these people were educated in China, and we were discussing the differences in education between what is received here and what is given there. A glaring point seems to have been discovered when I mentioned Chiang Kai Shek, who was the most prominent nationalist leader during WWII and became the President of Taiwan.

Our Chinese co-workers had no idea who we were talking about. I mean NO IDEA. We described him over and over... I did my best to muster up the best summary of his career that I could, on the spot and at work... but either my pronunciation of his name was so far from the mark that they didn't see who I was talking about, or they simply didn't learn about this guy the way we did.

I'm inclined to think it was a bit of both... we have people at work from Taiwan, too, and they knew no more than the mainlanders did about who Chiang Kai Shek was... yet I'd have bet my bottom dollar that their education system wasn't as biased against him as Red China's was, right?

Anyway... a very odd experience. Imagine, not one of those people knew who I was talking about. Undoubtedly one of the five most influential figures in Chinese politics in the last 200 years... and only the Americans knew who we were talking about.