This may be old news but I found it quite disturbing what a single little dot can do:

The life of 20-year-old Emine, and her 24-year-old husband Ramazan Çalçoban was pretty much the normal life of any couple in a separation process. After deciding to split up, the two kept having bitter arguments over the cellphone, sending text messages to each other until one day Ramazan wrote "you change the topic every time you run out of arguments." That day, the lack of a single dot over a letter—product of a faulty localization of the cellphone´s typing system—caused a chain of events that ended in a violent blood bath (Warning: offensive language ahead.)

The surreal mistake happened because Ramazan´s sent a message and Emine´s cellphone didn´t have an specific character from the Turkish alphabet: the letter "ı" or closed i. While "i" is available in all phones in Turkey—where this happened—the closed i apparently doesn´t exist in most of the terminals in that country.

The use of "i" resulted in an SMS with a completely twisted meaning: instead of writing the word "sıkısınca" it looked like he wrote "sikisince." Ramazan wanted to write "You change the topic every time you run out of arguments" (sounds familiar enough) but what Emine read was, "You change the topic every time they are fucking you" (sounds familiar too.)

Emine then showed the message to her father, who—enraged—called Ramazan, accusing him of treating his daughter as a prostitute. Ramazan went to the family´s home to apologize, only to be greeted by the father, Emine, two sisters and a lot of very sharp knives.

Injured and bleeding, with a knife on his chest, Ramazan tried to escape. Emine was still trying to finish him on the door, but he managed to take the knife out of his chest and attacked back, wounding her. Ramazan finally escaped, and was caught by the police, but Emine bleed to dead as the family waited for an ambulance to cross Ankara´s hellish traffic to reach their home.

Confused by all the events, he later killed himself in jail.

Apparently it´s not the first incident of this kind caused by the damned dot on top of the letter i. The local press has pointed out that the faulty localization of cellphones in Turkey is causing "serious problems" when it comes to certain "delicate words" in Turkish, and they are calling to enhance localization of technology to avoid these mistakes.

Alternatively, the press could ask for banning knives from the homes of demonstrably stupid people.

Has it ever happened to you to see a word and think it meant something else?  The eye and the mind is trained in a way that you do not read the complete word but you read the begining and your mind interprets the rest of the word.  So if the mind is used to associating the i with an a at the end of the word that is what your mind will read.

Nobody got killed over a missing dot. Somebody got killed because it seems that there are people out there who think it´s normal to kill somebody over bad name calling. People have done much worser things to me than call me a bad name, and nobody has died from that.

It sounds much more than a missing dot, rather than someone who was actually missing their own mind.

that is why when texting or chatting on msn, yahoo or whichever type of media, even email, people have to be carefull and adhere to a certain etiquette because we really do not know who we are dealing with at the other end of the message, just a simple misspelled word can escalate and be down right fatal.

Seems the moral of this story is to remember to dot your i´s and cross your t´s.

 Love it!