On an aquarium Facebook page, a fellow posted “coral war fair”.
I have seen various misspellings, “there” for “their” and stuff.
That seems pretty dumb. It passes the spell checker, but there is some lack of literacy of the guy who posted it.
Do people not learn to spell in school, or what? 
No, they don’t.
Yes, they prolly do. But they have nothing that keeps that information retained in their memories because they have no real need to know how to spell. There are programs, apps, etc. that do it for them. Kinda like math for me. 
I believe they were exposed to correct spelling. Not the same thing as learning it. Yeah, they do need to know how to spell; they just don’t know they need to.
ETA: This might belong in IMHO.
Mind. Just. Blown. 
I got my grade-school spelling medal 
and still spell pretty well, but I make errors like that all the time. (‘their’ for ‘there’ and others even more obviously due to brain hiccups). I catch them if I proofread, but I’m sure many slip through unchecked. I see similar slips in posts by other Dopers I’d believe to be excellent spellers.
I’m in my mid 60’s and don’t recall making such frequent spelling errors a decade or two ago. (I have no obvious Alzheimer’s or such, and can still write code and solve puzzles.)
The spelling errors I’m thinking of are unconscious and automatic as my finger-brain does its own thing. Errors go down if I stare at the keyboard while typing. I’m curious whether I’d make similar errors in handwriting, but not curious enough to spend much time handwriting, which I haven’t for decades.
ETA: And I know (and have always known) exactly how to spell because but still spell it becuase, probably becuase my fingers have had so much practice with that slightly more comfortable finger motion!)
It’s about attitude. They don’t think it is important to spell correctly or use good grammar. So they don’t bother to develop the skill. Some probably text a lot, and even spelling out common words is laborious and time-consuming, but give a little credit for at least doing that.
But there is also an issue of being observant. The writer has seen the word “warfare” many times in newspapers or online, and maybe even in a book, but never noticed that the spelling was different from what he assumed it was. Possibly incurious, too, but different people develop different skills and talents.
A good speller learns that words that are misspelled “look funny” and figures out how to correct them, but other people just don’t notice anomalies, and if they can guess the word using phonetics, they move right on.
I have, since I started typing (in high school, 1985) frequently typed “you” when I mean “your.” Somehow, and I don’t know how it started, just not gotten used to sending my fingers to the “r” when my thoughts go there.
I’ll be monitoring this thread for solutions, because I really do want to improve that and my other constant misspellings.
When I send a professional email, I often read and re-read my email, so I don’t miss out on a job. I often read the email backwards, depriving myself of the distraction caused by what I mean to say, and just looking at the words. But the process isn’t perfect.
I suppose a good plan would be to start writing on paper a few hours a day, to get myself back into the mode of thinking before writing.
Our culture is changing however. I knew a lady who loved the National Enquirer, as a valid news source :rolleyes: but was livid when they used words like “their” for “they’re.” I just said, our culture is changing, or language evolving, and furthermore, they have to fit the text rapidly into a narrow column, and editorial time is limited. But she just hated it.
I didn’t realise how poorly a lot of people spell until I got on the 'net. I was on a decluttering website a couple of weeks ago and a member talked about her ‘Chester draws’. For the briefest moment, I thought Chester was a brand or style of furniture (like Chippendale).
Random web pages are not the places to look for models of spelling, grammar, and usage. One sees all sorts of problems in writing, such as the comma splice.
Put knot yore trust inn spel chequers!
Bizarre web-spelling sometimes simply indicates a lack of complete understanding of the words that the user is essentially parroting, which is how all of us learned our early-stage language. If one has imperfect knowledge of multiple historical concepts and word origins, is it not surprising that one might write “pre-Madonna” to describe someone who has been heard referred to as a “prima donna”.
Everything is a learning process, which nobody finishes, and all one can hope to do is reduce mistakes to near-zero.
One enjoys the word choice errors and punctuation errors in an OP complaining about internet (lack of) literacy.
One that I’ve seen often–including a few times on this board–is mixing up break and brake.
If you delve into the history surrounding the Revolutionary War, one thing that you’ll likely find out is that spelling was not standardized even then. It’s a more recent development than that. I have sometimes wondered if we’re seeing the language return to those times.
Some people believe that using computers so much is fundamentally changing how we learn and think.
septimus, I still write some things by longhand. One thing I’ve noticed, whether writing or typing, is that my brain operates faster than my hands can. Sometimes I tend to think a few words ahead, and that has a strong tendency to mess with what I’m actually putting down.
There are essentially two ways to learn language: through listening & talking, or through reading and writing.
As youngsters first acquiring language, it’s all the former. In school it’s much more of the latter. And the farther up the school food chain, from elementary straight through to PhD, the less verbal and more reading/writing -centric it becomes.
After a person leaves school at whatever level, their personal habits diverge and folks tend to live much more heavily in one world or the other. Which results in …
Avid readers who have large vocabularies they can spell but not necessarily pronounce. And conversely …
TV watchers / conversationalists have lots of syllable groups that have semantic meaning which they think of as words. But they don’t know how to spell them. And sometimes the “words” are really phrases, e.g. “Pre-Madonna” for “prima donna”, “Chester draws” for “chest of drawers” and “war fair” for “warfare.”
Particularly where you see spellings that clearly are phoneme-by-phoneme transliterations of regional accents and slang you know you’re dealing with a person who doesn’t read; only listens.
The real miracle of the internet age is the vast number of people who now read or write (keyboard?) online who in an earlier era would have last set metaphorical pen to metaphorical paper late in high school, if even then. These people are slowly, haltingly, being carried back into the habit of reading & writing.
Folk music is simple music created and used by untrained amateur music-makers. What we’re now seeing is folk writing by people untrained amateur writers. Some of whom are much folksier / untrained than others.
Late edit: And note the couple of misplaced words in my work where I re-ordered a sentence and didn’t clean it up properly before the edit window ran out.
As I understand it, at one point spelling was variable such that even literate people didn’t necessarily spell a word the same way. People tended to spell a word as they spoke it in their local dialect, which of course varied. Standardized spelling came about fairly recently (the last couple of centuries), which also had the effect of moving spelling away from strictly phonetic to a more ideogrammatic basis- e.g., the letters T-H-E mean “the”, regardless of whether you actually say it as “thə”.
Great. Another thread about Tori. This is why I don’t read OPs, I don’t need to see any more of this gossip drivel online.
Tori?
I would wager that among the general population, spelling is probably better now than it ever has been before. There have always been good spellers and bad spellers, but the good spellers are probably now a greater proportion of the population. More people than ever before are communicating via the written (or typed) word, and many of our communication channels now give instant feedback on most (though not all) spelling errors.
What’s different is the selection effect, or rather the lack thereof. In our parents’ generation, someone who was a poor speller would be unlikely to get published, so you’d be unlikely to see any of their spelling, and even if a poor speller did get published, their words would pass through the hands of an editor or proofreader who would correct them. Nowadays, though, anyone at all who wishes to be published can be, and without any intermediary. So while we’ve always had the poor spellers, now they’re much more visible than they used to be.
Especially amusing, sometimes you’ll get a person who knows a word both as a set of sounds and as a sequence of letters, but who doesn’t realize that they’re the same word.