I couldn't find the spelling for a certain dead Libyan leader in The News-Sentinel style guide, so I went to one of our usage gurus. He said we use the AP style, which is Moammar Gadhafi. He also pointed me to this amusing (unless you're the overly sensitive type) AP article about why his name is spelled so many different ways:
Qaddafi, Qazzafi, Qadhdhafi, Qaththafi, Gadhdhafi, Khadafy?
The Associated Press goes with Gadhafi. It has to do with pronunciation — along with a series of letters the Libyan leader sent to American schoolchildren more than 25 years ago.
The spelling is complicated by a perfect storm of issues: Arabic letters or sounds that don't exist in English, differences in pronunciation between formal Arabic and dialects, and differences between transliteration systems.
The reason I needed the spelling check was a Charles Krauthammer column (not online yet, but you should be able to find it tomorrow) on a new phrase that seems to have entered the foreign affairs lexicon:
