Content-Type: text/shitpost

When I was a sysadmin at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the grad students asked me if I knew that “gullible” was missing from the dictionary. This is the oldest trick in the book.

“Huh, really?” I said, and turned to my open terminal session. “Lemme see…”

    % grep gullible /usr/dict/words  || echo missing
    missing

“…How about that! It's true!”

He was very surprised, and somewhat annoyed that his trick hadn't worked.

Wouldn't you expect that gullible would be in the word list used by the Unix spell checker? Usually it is, but I was the sysadmin of that machine, and I had removed it a couple of years before, just in case.