“Barack Obama” beats “Barak Obama” 72,000,000 to 178,000; about a 400 to 1 ratio. “Barack Hussein Obama”, though, beats “Barak Hussein Obama” 179,000 to 7480, for a relatively paltry 24-1 ratio. D the C may be on to something.
I’m going to also say it makes sense to me that many Americans, being more familiar with the Hebrew name Barak from the Bible and from news reports from Israel, would find it more natural to type the wrong transcription.
Now, would those who are less than fond of him, upon it being pointed out, figure they might as well continue to do it wrong (which after all makes him sound even more exotic) rather than be corrected by those elitist intellectuals, just to drive the point? Wouldn’t surprise me.
Me, I’m waiting for the day some Hispanic candidate named Jesús López-Johnson is in the race… see what they do about THAT name…
Well, maybe that will halt the Obama as Messiah meme. 
How long does a name have to be everywhere for people to absorb it, for pete’s sake. It’s been a year and a half that this name has been on every single newscast and in every single newspaper everywhere in the country every single day. The “lack of familiarity” argument seems a little hard to swallow.
I didn’t notice I was spelling it wrong until someone wrote a testy editorial. This was, IIRC, during the election campaign. I was familiar with the biblical Barak and the Israeli prime minister Barak, and so I only gave the spelling a cursory glance.
Now that I know the spelling, I try to be careful about it. Although I did write a parody scare-email titled “Barak Oybama Is A Secret Jew!”
I always figured they were fans of The Brak Show and just couldn’t spell Brak.
No, no, you’ve got it all wrong. It’s a veiled reference to his resemblance to Baraka.
Peepal kan’t spell knews et 11
I had a friend whose name was Jesus de la Cruz back in Texas. He never ran for political office though. He was big time liberal, and I would love to see how Fox News would handle his campaign.
Sure, but how many people named “Barack” have you ever heard of? I’ve known personally a great many "George"s, "Bill"s, "Jimmy"s, and "Richard"s, and a few "Ronald"s and "Gerald"s, plus many others I’ve heard of. I’ve been exposed to those names for decades, and on a face-to-face basis and in many different contexts. But I’ve only ever even heard of one “Barack” (well, two, counting his father), and that only in a single context, and for about five years.
You should really google some time and note how many perfectly familiar and common words are misspelled. I’m sure friend is in the papers every day, doesn’t stop it being a misspelled constantly. Your argument lacks merit. Many people are just naturally bad spellers.
The uniqueness of the name is, IMO, one of the reasons why the spelling of it would be absorbed. You hear a word you haven’t heard before, you think, what’s that word? And you look at it, and say oh, it’s that. And you hear it again and say “did I hear that once?” And you look and say oh, right, I have, it’s that word. It’s a rather natural learning process.
Yes, but remember, we’re talking about people who are writing about the man, which would assume having a level of familiarity with him beyond having merely heard his name at some point in time. And often they’re doing so in comments on blog posts and newspaper articles where the name is in the headline or the lede paragraph, right there, where they can see it. It screams either a remarkable carelessness or pointed intention, especially when it’s repeated.
Seconded. I am rather more familiar with the Barak spelling from Jewish usage, I bet if I did a search in whatever few missives I might have used his first name, I have probably misspelled it as Barak.
The argument that this is politically motivated is really a busted flush. Even if conservatives did get the notion to use Barak as a coded insult, what would be the point? It would be lost in the ocean of unintentional misspellings of the name.
One thing we can at least be sure of. The OP’s statement that he has seen the misspelling “almost exclusively on anti-Obama web sites” simply means that he wasn’t looking very carefully elsewhere.
The Hebrew root meaning “blessed” ends with the letter “chaf”, which sometimes has a “k” sound, and sometimes a guttaral “ch” sound (like in “yeccch”). This is the source of the names of philosopher Baruch Spinoza and financier Bernard Baruch.
The Hebrew root meaning “lightning” ends with the letter “kaf”, which always has the “k” sound. This is the spelling of the Biblical “Barak”. It is also the spelling of the name of Ehud Barak, who was Prime Minister of Israel from 1999 to 2001.
In Hebrew, these two roots are totally distinct from each other. I have no idea which is closer to the Arabic word from which Barack is derived.
Actually, I think that the correlation of this misspelling with the use of the “Hussein” middle name is a pretty good indicator that it is, to a significant degree, politically-motivated. Nobody uses his middle name unless they’re either being very meticulous about giving his exact name (which is the last place you’d expect to see accidental misspellings), or they’re trying to emphasize his “foreignness”, “Muslimness”, or “un-Americanness”.
Back in the day (you remember “the day” right), K used to denote Anti-Americanism as in the spelling Amerika. This could be consciously or unconsciously related, I suppose.
Not at all. You are just more comfortable thinking that it must be some unreasonable, blind hatred that nobody cares to find out the alternate spelling of the leader of your party.
I am familiar with both spellings, and I just can’t always remember which one fits him. Who cares? Maybe he spells it Barakk, it’s not something that concerns me.
Why do so many people spell Hitler’s first name Adolph? Are the Jewish interests trying to make Hitler’s first name ‘sound’ foreign?
hh