With all the charm for which he’s famous, Atrios dubs LGF Little Green Silly People and tries to make a beginner’s point about kerning.

One of the new words the right wingers have seized on is “kerning.” They’re obsessed that the “kerning” on the CBS memo is exactly the same as the “kerning” on an identical version typed into Word. The idea is that typewriters of the time which used proportional fonts still didn’t have any kind of kerning mechanism. That might be somewhat interesting, except for the fact that by default kerning is not turned on in Microsoft Word, and not used in the Word Document made by Charles Johnson of LGF (I won’t link, you can find it yourself. He’ll likely just set up a redirect if I do. The basic info is here at Tech Shill Station.)is not created with the kerning turned on.

To see the difference kerning makes - and it does make a small difference - highlight all of the text, go to format, font, character spacing, and click the kerning box.

Of course, Atrios is right, because as I very specifically said (pay attention this time, Duncan): I simply opened Word and started typing with the default settings.

My references to kerning were only as part of a much more detailed critique; there’s much more to this than just the spacing between characters (kerning).

And although the media is focused on it, there’s much more to this than the superscript “th” in “187^th.”

The vertical spacing between lines is identical. The right and left margins are identical. Each and every character in each and every line matches up with the exact same characters in the lines above and below. The line breaks fall exactly on Word’s autowrap boundaries. The date at upper right aligns perfectly with Word’s default tab stops.

Another of the bogus documents even has auto-centered text, again matched exactly by its Word equivalent.

And several other bloggers have done similar experiments with the other documents posted at CBS, and discovered the same exact 1:1 correspondence between the so-called “original” documents and quickly typed MS Word documents, using default settings.

In Atrios we see someone who has just recently learned the word “kerning,” and is ineptly using it to attempt a cheap spin—but the faster (and the lamer) the spin, the bigger the mess when they fall apart.