Genius!

Facebook is a pretty popular network these days. Personally, I don't use it very often, but whenever I do log in, I usually have 10 or so invitations to various groups or events, most of which I ignore without reading. Sometimes, however, a group catches my eye as intriguing: 1,000,000 Strong for Colbert, for instance, or I bet I can Find a Million People who Dislike George Bush. I was reading through the discussion board of the latter group, chuckling to myself at all the comments, when I came across a link that I just could not pass up - a site called Kill Bush.

I imagine you can all figure out the agenda of this site without much help, but what I found really funny (besides the fact that sites like this exist) was a clever grammatical device they used in one of their stories. It's pretty apparent that whoever made the site is not exactly a grammarian, as the majority of the text is wrong in some way or another. However, a phrase that I noted immediately was the figure they cited as the number of people Bush has killed, or something like that: "tenths of millions."

This is pure genius.

I actually didn't even notice when I first read it what it actually said, until, a few sentences later, it occurred to me that the entire population of Iraq is something like 30 million. I admit I haven't been keeping up on the death tolls, but I think I would have heard about it if a third of the country had died. The author of this article has come up with a way to inflate figures without actually inflating them: use fractions that sound like big numbers. The next time I complain about my tuition bill, I'm going to say that I'm in debt by hundreths of millions of dollars. Maybe I can get a tax break that way.

Either that, or the author actually meant to say "tens of millions," and just sucks so bad at writing that he/she didn't notice that they used the wrong word. That's probably more likely.