I’ve been here for years: for most of those, I’ve been overjoyed to be part of a board that is really anal about grammar and spelling. Decent grammar (and good spelling) makes for a very happy kambuckta.
Yet I’ve noticed a distinct deterioration in the past few months. And not only from new posters: many of the old-timers appear to be slipping as well. It’s not the less common words that are being farnarkled, it’s the ubiquitous ones, like there, their, and they’re (just to give examples).
And I reckon it’s down to the predictive texting shit that all the new-fangled tablets and IPhones and suchlike use.
May I make a request? Before we end up like every other illiterate messageboard in the universe, can folks please check their post before posting?? Just read it?? See if it’s OK or not??
Thanking you from the bottom of my Spelling-Nazi heart!
The population of the Dope was already old when the board was founded, now they’re slipping into dementia and spelling is the first thing to go. If you’d like literature on dealing with aging family I could probably dig some up.
I was just wondering the same thing. There seems to be an increase in spelling errors everywhere on the Internet, compared to 5 years ago. I was going to use there/their/they’re and your/you’re as well. I thought it might be due to it being easier to go online.
Actually, spelling is one of the* last* things to go. You might be shitting your pants, and drooling out the side of your mouth, but damned right you can still spell hippopotamus and Kosciusko.
I must admit my spelling has suffered from using an iPad to surf the boards. It’s so much easier using Tapatalk to explore the board. However typing messages on an iPad is certainly much less accurate and it’s very easy to make an error. I try to read back what I’ve written but a few errors often go under the radar.
The only crumb of comfort I can offer is that I peruse the boards much more often and contribute more. So perhaps ignorance is being fought on new and better fronts. And maybe, just maybe, spell checking on IOS devices and other such things will improve and errors will once again go back to their normal level.
Just as I thought. Thanks for your confession Fiendish one!
I guess I just despair for the future of our “written” language. Sure, spelling errors or not, I can decipher (most) text I see on the net. But communication is so damned important, and I’m seeing such a decline in such a short time that it is worrisome.
Of course, YMMV etc etc, but I’m old and cranky and don’t wanna have to do a double-take every time somebody misspells too many words.
Spell checking helps produce malaprops like “Communist gorillas.” You gotta learn the difference between “ascent” and “assent,” “combing” and “coaming,” “ordnance” and “ordinance,” et cetera.
I can spell well, but I’ve noticed on preview that sometimes my fingers are on autopilot and I end up with, um, interesting variants. Or maybe I’ve been correct all these years about having a defective keyboard!!
(On edit)-- But seriously-- that crap bugs me too. It’s easy for people to just call it pedantic or just call you a spelling-nazi, but this shit is important. It means something. It says something about who you are and the value of what you have to say.
This ain’t YouTube comments or Yahoo Answers! (At least I hope it’s not).
They added a “z” to Kosciuszko. Didn’t you get the memo?
Despite living no where near Mt Kosciuszko, I went to a primary school with “Kosciusko” in its name. As if that wasn’t already hard enough for a small child to spell, they had to go and add a superfluous “z” to the damn word. Fortunately I was many years out of primary school when it changed.
Sometimes I’m reading and typing so quickly, looking at the keypad, I don’t even realize I’ve been autocorrected with some word that makes absolutely no sense.
Turn it off. In the spirit of all that is good and wholesome about the SDMB, switch off your autocorrect, and revert to our innate and amazing literacy.
We’re so damned good at it we don’t need any artificial handicaps!
Posters can make all the spelling errors they want as far as I’m concerned, if in trade I could get our highly trained hospital staff to stop calling over the intercom for “Res-pi-tory Services”.
And they don’t just make that mistake in Feb-u-ary, either.
They should be dunked in for-mulin (another loathsome mispronunciation I am constantly subjected to).
Spelling is the least of the things that bugs me when it comes to what passes for writing “style” for some people.
My biggest pet peeves include run-on sentences with nary a punctuation mark in sight, and absolutely no paragraph breaks to be found anywhere-the SolidWallOfTextSyndrome. And to make it worse these two sins usually occur together…
