It might mean that their priorities in choosing advisors and support staff are more ideological - who toes the party line, who believes the right things and expresses their beliefs most vehemently - than practical.
Which still might lead one to question their fitness for office. But “Are you angry enough about the right things?” seems to be the foremost qualification in the minds of many US voters right now. Within that (damaged, IMHO) mindset, poor spelling might be considered a lesser sin than heterodoxy.
My IQ is 155, according to the mail-in marked Mensa admission test. It wasn’t supervised, but cheating at an IQ test and then paying money to have it marked would be pretty stupid, so believe me if you like. Apparently I’m 1 in 3,000.
My spelling’s pretty much perfect, there’s the odd one or two words I get habitually wrong, but eventually I look them up and get better. My grammar’s pretty good too, though I mostly write in an informal style.
I think spell-checkers are a curse on humanity. Many people assume that if the spell-checker passes it, it must be ok, forgetting the many many valid English words that are slight anagrams of the word they meant to use. It also, I think, off-loads responsibility from the brain to a dumb machine. And don’t get me STARTED on “grammar” “checkers”.
It’s only since Facebook started I’ve realised what an appaling job the English-speaking world’s schools have done on teaching people to spell. Practically every post contains multiple errors. As a pedant and smart-arse, this really annoys me, and punctuation abuse is worse! “!!!” is not 4 times as exclamatory as “!” .
Did you REALLY laugh out loud? REALLY?
Shakespeare managed to make jokes without putting little smiley faces in (tho it might have helped, he wasn’t a hilarious guy).
Thinking about it, Shakespeare didn’t have the modern entertainment equivalent, canned laughter (unless he gave out free beer to the front row). If a joke needs a little sign, or pasted-on laughter, it probably isn’t funny.
So are people getting stupider? Or am I just underestimating how stupid they always have been?
Actually my phone capitalises I automatically (in the T9 predictive mode). Also capitalises “it’s”, as in “it is”, and a few other annoying mistakes. Keying 2-8 ought to bring up “at” rather than “bu”. They ought to make a phone with a dictionary you can take words OUT of.
I’d disagree. I don’t have a brilliant memory for arbitrary facts, I frequently forget appointments etc. But my spelling is very good, and I’m very good at understanding things like science, machines, etc. Basically if it’s a SYSTEM to UNDERSTAND then I take it on board well. If it’s just random facts to remember, I’m below-average.
All languages are systems. I only really inferred the formal rules of English when learning them for a foreign language, you don’t realise the rules are there as a natural speaker, even though you use them correctly. Though according to some here English is one of the simplest languages to learn, sensibly having no gender (WHO would invent a perverse thing like that!?) and simpler other rules.
So spelling is understanding, and building internally, a system, with rules and data. Most people can make a good guess at how to spell an unknown word, it’s not just memorising. The ability to turn real-life things into symbols, manipulate those symbols, then put together a sensible answer back in the right format, is a lot of what IQ tests measure, and I think a lot of what intelligence is. Those are also the skills used in spelling. So I’d argue, logically, that spelling correlates with intelligence, though I haven’t any actual data on that.
I’m not disputing your score, but I will point out that it is one thing to pay for someone to score something you’ve cheated on just so you can see the result, it’s another to cheat and pay for it to be scored when that number will be used in some way to establish an outward comparison or status, and possibly even grant you membership to an exclusive group with some status associated with that. Just as a nitpick, you understand, not that I think you cheated.
I have enough self-restraint to stop myself from pointing out the spelling error greenaum made in one of his posts. (Not counting his UK-appropriate spellings of words like “memorise” and what I will assume was an intentional shortening of “tho.”) But not enough self-restraint to stop myself from pointing out that one was made at all. Sorry.
“Appalling.” I’m really not usually a spelling nazi, honestly. But it’s practically a compulsion to mention it if someone makes a spelling error in a post where they are complaining about spelling errors. I apologize profusely. Carry on.
I have a Sudoku puzzle-of-the-day app on my iPhone where you can post your solution time. Every day, dozens of people put in times as low as one minute, which can only have been achieved by solving the puzzle once, writing down the solution, then starting over and copying the solution as fast as they can type.
I find it absolutely amazing that there are so many mistakes in a forum discussing spelling mistakes.
An old friend of mine once said “Image is everything”. She was referring to my choice of shampoo, insisting that mine was an “old lady’s shampoo”. But her point was that I choose everything that I do and say and write, and other people base their opinions about me on those things. They have to. They have no other choice. It’s the same thing on the internet. Everything I know about you is in the post above. My spell checker underlined five words in red in the post above - and there are other grammatical errors that make this post harder to read than it needs to be.
Maybe I have more time than most, or maybe I’m more sensitive than others, but I do not want to be perceived as someone I’m not. To that end, I always re-read my posts and edit for spelling mistakes (and there are lots of them), re-read them again and edit for word usage and sentence structure. Then I re-read again, and again, until I’m satisfied that my post represents me, and they way I want to be perceived.
If there’s a spelling mistake here, it’s because I had a total brain-fart and overlooked it. If my sentence structure is wonky, it’s because that is how I talk. If I just can’t seem to massage my thoughts into a form that I like, I’ll delete the post and walk away. No one really cares if I post or not, but I care very much about being taken the wrong way.
I don’t mind occasional spelling mistakes, but when it’s obvious the writer isn’t even trying, they lose their credibility (except in the case of “ol’ Redneck” in a woodworking forum I used to read… HE couldn’t spell, and he KNEW it!).
Heh, heh… I see that Gaudere’s Law is still ‘alive and well’.
“I care very much about being taken the wrong way.” So in essence, you want to be certain that we all understand that you can spell very well (most of the time;)), and that you’re going to do it in a “wonky” style. Correct?
(And just for the record, “I resemble those remarks, good sir.”)
I had to look up “Gaudere’s Law”, and it pointed back to this forum. This ‘law’ seems to speak of spelling mistakes in posts complaining about spelling mistakes. Did I make a spelling mistake? Oh look at that, I did. :smack:
I don’t want to be known only as a person that spells well and writes in a wonky style. If it wasn’t for this post these things wouldn’t occur to you. You would simply see no (strike that) few spelling mistakes, and a post written in an informal style.
Along similar lines - my wife took a course called Quality Management. The circular for that course was also littered with spelling mistakes! A course on Quality! And these were not your run-of-the-mill spelling mistakes. It looked like the author had a stroke, and their fingers went wild on the keyboard. That document can not have been proof-read by anyone! Here’s a shot of it (if you have permission to google+ posts) https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-Y-MLEaBPrvU/Tio0z9VUQbI/AAAAAAAAARQ/R3fnWcq5bN4/s1152/stroke.jpg
No, I most definitely meant resemble. As in, the above statements describe me very accurately.
I relate quite strongly with your statement, “I do not want to be perceived as someone I’m not.”
The above, is just me being ‘snarky’. (Apologies offered, if I’ve offended.)
(bolding mine)
I disagree. By saying that, you discount my ability to comprehend from your writing, (spelling, punctuation, etc.) the view or thought that you’re trying to convey and your skill at doing so. (To which I’ll concede, you’re doing a fine job so far. ;))
And I’ll have to agree with ya’ about that document you linked to. That is hysterically funny, as far as ironic humor is concerned.
Fair enough. FWIW I never got round to actually posting the application to join off. I suppose it might have been worth cheating if I hadn’t lost the result letter years ago. But I just wanted to know for my own curiosity, I had IQ tests as a kid that said I was smart, but wanted to know exactly how smart, IQ wise, as an adult.
And overall, as it is now it’d be easier to just lie about it on the Internet.
I’ve never felt that poor spellers were necessarily stupid, just lazy. I myself am generally a good speller, but occassionally I’ll mis-type a word, or there’ll be a word I’m not too familiar with, so I’ll spell it wrong. Even proofreading your own work isn’t necessarily enough, as your brain can overlook the error, seeing what it supposes should be there, as oppsoed to what is actually there.
What bothers me most isn’t the occasional typo or missed word, it’s when the writer completely butchers the language, but genuinely doesn’t seem to care. Generally, I’ve found that if a person is learning English as a second language, they’ll actually welcome polite correction. If it’s an American (I speak and write American, as opposed to British English, so I’m picking on them), however, and one who has grown up speaking/writing the language, quite often they’ll act offended that you dare expect them to write correctly.
On the internet, I tend not to worry too much, at least on message boards. But on professional websites (or, recently, someone in my workcenter), it bothers me. If you want me to take your website/email/paper seriously, proofread it, and then have someone else look it over to catch what you might have missed.
As for the question “Are poor spellers stupid?” I’d say not necessarily, but it certainly can make you look that way, depending on how badly you do.
It’s not just spelling - using the proper singular or plural pronoun form is a constituent of correct writing also. In the old days (pre-PC), usually the masculine pronoun was used to refer to an individual of indeterminate sex (..perhaps he - gamerunknown - was inebriated..)
(To which I’ll concede, you’re doing a fine job so far. ;))