Mumbai: An extra letter can change the meaning of an entire sentence. A Turkish journalist has been jailed for 10 months for insulting the prime minister with a typo on twitter where an extra letter changed the meaning of ‘my chief’ to f*** off’, according to the Daily Mail.
Prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had announced plans to shut down private schools including those run by the Gulen movement - now one of the government's enemies. The journalist Onder Aytac, who has 180,000 followers on the social media site, reacted to the news by tweeting the words: 'KAPAT BE USTAAAAAAMMMMMMK'.
In Turkish, the word 'ustam' means 'my chief' or 'my master' but by adding a 'k' at the end of the word it changed the meaning entirely.
“The columnist claims it was just a typo and that he never meant to add the 'k' to the end of the tweet. Instead he says he meant to say: 'Close them down my chief'’, the report said.
However, Turkey’s defamation laws make it a crime to insult public officials during the course of their job and hence he’s been slapped with a 10-month jail sentence.
According to the report, Aytac, a former police official, is a well-known writer for the opposition newspaper Taraf, which is part of Erdogan's former-ally Gulen movement.
