Yes, but as we continue to lose ground in the fight against ignorance (and I do consider bad spelling, grammar, and word usage to be part of ignorance), the people reading the résumés of the poor spellers will be poor spellers themselves, and they won’t know the difference. ::heavy sigh::
I defended my right to be a not so perfect speller in a recent post. I do however have my limits of tolerance. This thread reminded me of a note my ex-mother-in-law wrote to my son’s teacher.
I present it here for all to see, exactly as she wrote it: (and note when you read the salutation that this is to the teacher *about *my son Tyler)
Tyler, Said the new boy in his class is picking on him at school on the playground and on the bus. He would like for you to have atalk with the new boy and Tyler at is same time And fine out why the new boy dose not Like Tyler. Could he please stop fitting and just be friends.
Thank you. Tyler’s Grandmother
I kid you not. This is a 56 year old woman who is attending nursing school. I’m sure there are way more errors than what I highlighted. I did NOT give this letter to his teacher because first of all the whole situation was bogus. My son was the one being a bully. Secondly, I would be embarrassed to admit that I was ever married into a family that produced someone who spells that horribly.
Again, I admit my spelling is never perfect, not to mention grammar and punctuation. But that…is just…atrocious.
I lurk a great deal on these boards. I’m a lurker by nature. I like to lurk. I love to surreptitiously monitor the pulse of the world through the regular posters’ wonderful posts. I can go YEARS without posting (it’s not like sex, after all), but here I find myself with my third post in three days in this one thread!
And this time, it was not a client’s idiot misinterpretations of the English language, but a lawyer’s!! He wrote a memo about a dance club manager putting corn meal on the dance floor (don’t ask). He said the potential defendants “have to of known or should of known of the dangerous condition.” And he uses the term “corn mill” not once, but twice in that message.
Yeah, ‘fra-gee-lay…must be Italian…’ (‘Christmas Story’) for ‘fragile’ is a biggie around our house. I think we even have a moving box flagged as ‘Fragile: Italian Breakables’ in the basement!
I have a cow-irker who uses pretty much every word over 2 syllables wrong, both verbally and in writing: ‘You don’t want to negligence that account, or they’ll complain that we’re not helping them.’ ‘I found that form…it was in the mongst of my files.’ And yes, she pronounces the final ‘s’ in ‘Illinois.’
I had a boss a few years ago who was convinced that ‘volume’ was spelled ‘volumn,’ and made us spell it that way on all of the sales quotes we put out. He wouldn’t sign them unless it was spelled like that. I hated having my name on those - I know our buyers were laughing up their sleeves at us.
Boy, you’ve got some ordacity trying to correctualize my grammaticals.
Someone actually used “ordacity” while having an argument with a friend of mine.
Something about how the girl though my friend had a lot of ordacity to think that she should have to pay her bills on time (roommates :rolleyes: ) like my friend.
Stillwell --you should see some of the charting that I see.
When I chart, I always imagine it blown up and on display for a courtroom to see. Charting has its own stylizations, but spelling and basic sentence structure is the same–you know, noun-verb stuff?
Oy.
Often-times here I am not the best grammarian–I tend to post the way I talk. But if I am turning in written document of some kind or sending a letter…it does indeed matter.
I agree with most (maybe all!) of the ones I’ve seen so far, but here are a couple more:
“all the sudden” - I hear this often enough that if I didn’t know better, I might have been convinced that it’s correct.
“pet” as the past tense of what you do to your cat or dog. (“I pet him one last time before I left for the day,” or “My cat likes being pet.”) Yes, I’m sure your cat loves being your pet–but does he like being petted?