Dammb Blakbery!.

Lindsay Lohan's publicist DID NOT like it when the press marveled at the spectacle . . . um, movie star's truly impressive atomization of the English language in a condolence E-mail she sent to the family of late director Robert Altman.

Lindsay is not an illiterate boob, says spokeswoman Leslie Sloane.

"When I got the reports that he had died, I reached Lindsay on her cell phone, and she had no idea. She was devastated. She started crying," Sloane told Reuters. "She quickly put something together on her Blackberry."

"Here was a girl who found something special in this man that she felt so close to," Sloane said. "And she was completely shocked and blown away that he just died. It was written very quickly and it was from the heart."

Lohan titled her November 21 e-mail "Dead is hard, Life is much easier," a quote she attributes to actor Jack Nicholson. In it, she sent condolences to Altman's family, adding, "I feel as I've just had the wind knocked out of me."

The film star, who is famously estranged from her father, also describes Altman as "the closest thing to my father and grandfather that I really do believe I've had in several years."

Days after the missive was made public, Los Angeles Times columnist Patt Morrison ridiculed it on a Web site as "alarmingly incoherent," apparently referring to misspellings and grammatical errors by Lohan, and wrote that Altman himself might find it "comedic."

Andrew Gumbel wrote in the London Independent that the letter, which ends with the odd sign-off "Be Adequite," had become the talk of Hollywood.

Leslie, sweetie daaahling, the problem the press has isn't that this poor child wrote an incoherent, misspelled mess of an E-mail to Altman's survivors. The problem the press has is that this poor child wrote an incoherent, misspelled mess of an E-mail to Altman's survivors, then self-servingly released it to reporters of her own free will so that the world might be duly impressed with her (ahem) profundity.

That, and the fact that Lindsay -- who truly, more than anything, deserves our pity -- has spent the past couple of years or so making a royal ass and spectacle of herself.

Still, Ms. Sloane's point about quickly and distraughtly dashing off messages on teeny weenie keypads is well taken. I'm sure Lindsay Lohan DID NOT mean to type "Be Adequite."

What she meant to type, I am confident, is "V2 #d2@U-tE."

Who do people think Lindsay is, after all? Britney Spears?