Hi Bill
Gee - I can only sympathise with your position with this head*unter - he can use his spelling skills to guess the missing letter.
I've been involved in a jobsearch for several months now and have to say my experience with recruiters is very mixed. There are some good ones - but there are a load like this guy who just talk BS to both candidates and their clients.
My own experience with many of them has been that a lot of them know very little about the businesses they recruit for or their clients and are totally disingenuous and superficial in their approach and motivated only by money. For this reason they don't try to help.
In particular, I have an unusual, left field background and some high-level credentials in my field but don't tick the standardised boxes for the field I want to go into - in fact I am a lot better qualified than many candidates and have many more transferable skills. many of the headhunters though will simply not consider me as they only want to tick boxes, and, as you say, paste over a gap with some warm flesh and earn a fat fee from a business that could have recruited a better person direct. If any of this sounds arrogant, it's not - I've checked my analysis by contacting senior people in the functions I am applying to directly, who actually know their business and almost without exception get a positive response. in a number of cases they've then put me up for the same posts their own retained headhunter had already reejcetd me for with barely a glance at the CV. Part of the problem is that those other process-fillers, in HR, brief the headhunters and both lots just go through standard processes and ignore the human factor. The only way to circumvent these people is to go to the actual managers of the business/function, obviously where credentials justify this.
So my experience chimes with your's, and with another encounter I had with some recruiters in a bar some years ago - obnoxious arrogant men who'd done nothing in their lives but thought they were fantastically better than everyone solely on the basis of their very large but unjustified incomes.
I like how the guy had a go at your point about spelling when these sorts of basic skills are part of the (quite correct) expectation of candidates. Half of these people couldn't do a "real job" not founded entirely on spin and bullsh*t and a basically the worse kind of parasite. I hope your contact has to endure things from the other side sometime soon.
(Btw, I try to resist internet comments but my own experiences made me feel I needed to get this of my chest).

Thanks for sharing your experience. I should point out that I have met many fine recruiters over the years, who I consider a different breed of professional from the folks I call headhunters. Best of luck in your job search!