A spinoff from a point that came up in this thread…
Do you routinely or frequently find yourself correcting other people’s grammar, or choice of words?
Or do you find yourself telling people that they are doing some activity or action wrong, and should do it a different way?
Why do you do it? What, if anything, do you get out of it? What purpose is served by it? What bad things do you feel might happen if you didn’t do it?
Full disclosure: my own motivation for asking this question is that I just wonder about the motivation of people who do this. I make online videos and I get ‘corrected’ a lot (not just on grammar and word choices - also on everything else); more than half of the time, the ‘correction’ itself is simply incorrect. More than half of the remaining examples (where the correction is technically correct), it really doesn’t matter at all.
Thus, I find myself annoyed by incorrect or unnecessary corrections probably more than the average person, and probably more than I should.
A few examples, just for clarity, of some ‘incorrections’ that I frequently encounter:
People told me I shouldn’t use the words ‘trash’ or ‘candy’, because I am English, not American. They’re wrong; those words are also part of British English (and indeed both words appear, for example, in the works of Shakespeare). Also even if they were right, my vocabulary is not enforced like that.
People frequently tell me I am using my can opener in the wrong orientation (I am not; I am using it according to the manufacturer’s directions and it doesn’t actually work in the side-opening orientation they are asserting).
People very frequently tell me I shouldn’t use a can opener on a can that has a pull-tab top (they are right in the notion that the pull tab is there to provide a means of opening the can without a can opener, but they are quite wrong in their imagined notion that the presence of the pull tab somehow forbids the choice or preference of still using a can opener).
People sometimes tell me I shouldn’t say ‘can’ when I mean ‘tin’, again, because I am English, not American and again, they are simply wrong; both words exist in British English.
People often tell me that I prepared a product wrongly - explaining “You’re supposed to…” followed by a description of what is presumably their preferred method, which method is mentioned or implied nowhere on the product packaging.
Obviously this thread isn’t exclusively about why people ‘incorrect’ other people (although if you routinely correct people, there’s a fair chance you also accidentally incorrect, sometimes) - it’s about correcting in general - I just want to get a better insight of what drives you to do it.
Also, I recognise that I am not immune to correcting people, so no high horse here.
I don’t correct people in person, that would be rude.
I correct people on the internet at times, when their information would lead others to wrong conclusions.As a kind of public service.There’s a plethora of wildly inaccurate crap on the internet, as well as outright lies. As I’m sure you know.
Because generally people become infuriated when their grammar and spelling is corrected, supported by a horde of other readers who probably recognize a compatriot in inability, I mostly just sigh and pass on.
The impulse to correct minor things when the intent is perfectly clear comes from some combination of helpful condescension and an effort to make things perfect, like fixing a crooked picture frame. At least for me.
There is one youtube channel I watch where they play board games, and they seem to have no idea about the use of die/dice. If it was just the common speech model where many people always use “dice” whether talking about dice or a die that would be one thing, but continued use of both terms but not consistently correct.
“So we need to roll 4 blue die then take the the highest dice then role the other 3 dice and then take the total of the lowest 2 die”
I make a comment every week they play a dice heavy game. I doubt that anyone reads or cares but it feels good to unload, and just maybe someone on the cast will spot it and stop doing it. (One can only hope)
Ah well, there’s your answer. People can’t help but blurt out something that makes them feel more clever than you, when they are in a fairly anonymous space. In person, not so much.
Look at it in a positive light: it’s increasing your audience engagement no matter what they are commenting about.
There is a guy who posts YouTube shorts about his business that makes little gold bars, and he regularly says “gold coins” instead of “gold bars” everywhere, prompting thousands of people to tell him he is calling the gold bars the wrong thing. One day he casually said he has been intentionally calling them gold coins to troll everyone in order to increase “audience engagement”. He continues to this day.
Yep. That’s it. And it happens here quite often as well (gasp!). It’s frustrating to craft a post about something and then the “well actually…” folks come in.
And it does happen in real life. I have a family member who regularly completes my sentences and tells me when I am incorrect about something (e.g. You mean “Canada Geese”, not “Canadian Geese”… That’s what they are called).
I should also clarify; I don’t think I am perfect. I would love to welcome correction, but the experience of being corrected is soured by the huge majority of corrections being wrong or pointless.
Yeah, I’ve seen a few YouTubers who are clearly including deliberate mistakes to troll engagement - one in particular (I remember the videos, but can’t recall who), always pronounces just one word conspicuously wrong (not the same word each time, but only one word out of the video)
“Joking” by intentionally annoying other posters (@Mangetout had just explained how he was made unhappy by being corrected all the time, especially incorrectly) is being a jerk.
Yeah, these kinds of corrections rarely happen to me e.g. I’m a brit, who uses the noun “can”, and sometimes “trash”, and I have never been “incorrected” on such things.
Perhaps it’s generational? I know if I hang out with people 60+ they are more inclined to offer up corrections on things (that are frequently either equivocal or out of date).
In terms of whether I correct other people – almost never. Indeed, as per the art of persuasion, I might find myself mirroring some of the other person’s terms within that conversation.
In my job I need to be Polly Pedant on anything that might go into our ads or docs, but of course that’s different.
I think it’s YouTube. If you posted that stuff on YouTube, someone might correct you, too.
YouTubers get a lot of comments. And most are supportive or interesting or helpful. And that leaves a lot that aren’t any of those things. I follow a guy who streams Minecraft, and he gets regular posts from someone urging him to embrace Jesus Christ. And not targeted posts (you mentioned this particular problem in your life and faith could help in this way) but just generic schlock.
But also, I suspect that people who grew up being (legitimately or excessively) corrected by parents and teachers have somehow internalized that that’s an acceptable thing to do in general.
And sometimes it actually is. When I have the urge to correct someone else, I try to only do so if, and in a manner that, I would want to be corrected myself for a similar mistake.
Yeah, actually it’s pretty useful to do that - I recall an email conversation with an American customer, back when I had a real job, where my colleagues were puzzled that I wrote ‘check’ instead of ‘cheque’. I doubt there would have been any confusion either way, but it seemed like an obvious thing to do in the context.
(This happens to be another area where people correct me - for example if I’m making a recipe where I add what we call cornflour, I will nearly always refer to it as ‘cornflour, that is, corn starch’ - just the first time I mention it - because it’s clearer communication and I know a portion of the audience is American, but I also get uptight Brits telling me not to Americanise myself)
In US recording studio parlance headphones are often referred to as cans.
But when I was running a recording studio in London, we used to say: dash it all, we’re British.
We’ll listen to that mix in the tins, dammit!
Getting back to topic: I metaphorically roll my eyes quite often but very seldom actually say anything.