Spelling on the web

“Dinning”. I read a message board devoted to cruise ships, and people are forever going on about the Dinning rooms, the Dinning menu, the Dinning plan, and specialty Dinning, often all four in the same damn post.

Waly Kelly used that phrase in the comic strip, “Pogo”.

Possible causes of poor spelling not related to stupidity, ignorance or dyslexia:
[ol]
[li] “Use” vocabulary vs “recognition” vocabulary. You might know what the word means when you see it, but not write it enough to have memorized the spelling.[/li][li] “Oral” vocabulary vs “written” vocabulary, which as mentioned already can go both ways: you can spell it but not say it, or say it but not spell it.[/li][li] Overactive autocorrect. I have a particular hatred for one text editor I use, which will automatically and silently “fix” any word it doesn’t recognize unless it’s too far away from any of its pattern-matches, which fubars your text not only when there is an actual word you want to use that it doesn’t recognize, but when you make a typo that it mis-recognizes. Splitting one word into two, as in the OP, is one of its favorite “fixes”. My iPad also likes to do this (and also to introduce random exclamation points, which I don’t understand at all).[/li][li] Typos. Either because you don’t notice them, perhaps because you are in a rush or using something with a small screen and they have scrolled off the top of the screen, or you are using a device that makes them painful to fix if you’ve already added more text (my phone, for instance, which seems to have been designed under the impression that you would never want to edit something already typed).[/li][li] Think-os. Homonyms, verb tense, subject-verb agreement, etc can all get garbled between brain and keyboard even if you are perfectly aware of the difference, especially if you get distracted while writing or are writing a long and complex sentence.[/li][li] Overreliance on autocorrect, which may lead you to stop proofreading or to never learn the spelling in the first place, on the grounds that the software will catch it. (Apparently, this is a major issue with Japanese and Chinese; no-one bothers to learn how to write the less common characters, because the autocomplete function will fill them in from the hirigana/keitai/pinyin.) Add in #3, and let the fun begin.[/li][li] Just not being a good writer. My mother, who is highly educated and reads Serious Literature recreationally, writes emails that look utterly illiterate: no capitalization or punctuation, lots of abbreviations, typos everywhere… If you chatted with her and then got an email from her, you wouldn’t believe it was the same person.[/li][/ol]

My mom likes to use the word “chatsky” (spoken) to describe random bric-a-brac. In childhood I came across the word “tchotchkes” (written) to describe random bric-a-brac, and I quite liked its oddity. I was in my late teens when I realized these were the same word…

I have a PhD and do a lot of technical writing as part of my job. I have to stop and think about lose/loose every single time I write either.

I don’t think it’s that straightforward. I have a collection of c1910 postcards that I bought to get the pretty postcard albums; the postcards themselves were cheap and generic and I thought they’d be junk. In fact they turned out to be fascinating, the record of one woman’s chatter with friends and relations, mostly relatively local: they are like casual emails or Twitter or Facebook posts, little snippets of gossip, minor life updates, conversations about family happenings, some representing exchanges where each side must have responded within a day or so (of course I only have one side of each of these conversations…). A couple of the owner’s correspondents look very poorly educated, judging from handwriting and writing style, but they were also active writers who sent her a lot of these little missives.

I have always assumed (perhaps naively ) that when people write “Viola!” , they are making a deliberate linguistic joke… an intentional malapropism.

Like when a folk singer performs a song solo, without benefit of instrumental accompaniment, and announces that he/she will perform the song “unaccomplished”.

:smack: After all this time I notice that voila and viola are spelled differently.

My biggest pet peeve: the past tense form of the verb “lead” is “led”. It seems that many people don’t realize this, or forget it, and just write “lead”. I even see this slip past editors into published works.

You sure have. :wink:

My excuse for errors is a combination of Fat Finger Syndrome and aging eyesight. When young whippersnappers do it, its just carelessness.

Strange. I also usually misspell because due to fingers going too fast, but it always comes out becasue. Looks like that U just doesn’t want to go where it belongs.

I’m not sure what causes this kind of error, although it’s not the only one I’m prone to. For instance, I often type -ing as -ign. And this as thsi. (I proofread my posts, so you won’t see many that get into actual posts.) What’s really strange is that I haven’t always had these quirks. Go back 10 or 15 years and I had a different set.

I have seen webpages with the name of the owning organization misspelled in the heading of the page!

Those kind of typos are fairly common. They come from mistiming of key sequence, especially switching between two hands. They are fairly consistent because they are ingrained patterns. To fix them, I would expect one has to spend time specifically typing those sequences correctly, first slowly, and eventually speeding up. I haven’t bothered.

Adding to autocorrect is “swipe”, where you slide around the on-screen keyboard and the predictive algorithm guesses what you mean. It’s the same algorithm, just adaptive as you write the word. That also leads to incorrect words, and you don’t realize because you think you hit the letters right. You’re looking at the keypad to aim what you type, not the screen.

I think there’s also an issue in a lot of people online who never learned how to type. So, for them, typing anything is a rather laborious process, and they are just satisfied to get what they want to say out there.

Then there’s the fact that, although we are writing more, a lot of our writing goes to other people of similar skill levels. Facebook and such are much more informal. (Hell, on Facebook, I often feel I’m too formal, and I’m writing less formally than I do even here.)

The same stuff applies to younger people, too, but due more to using tablets and phones. I see it from my sister a lot, and she’s not a bad speller at all. But she’s not going to go back and fix something for casual communication. Hence, she’s no example to anyone she talks to who isn’t as good as she.

Phones do make it harder to type and harder to edit.

Some of mine tend to come and go fairly quickly. For instance, not too long ago (something like half a year or so), I was typing -ion as -ino. Now that’s been replaced with the -ign error, which I was not making then. The becasue error has been around longer, although I’m not sure exactly how long.

Oh, another very common typo for me is jsut for just. The others only happen sometimes, but that one is virtually every time.

I’m not sure exactly what that is, but that may be because I don’t use autocorrect. I usually ignore the predictive text on Google and Wikipedia and just type what I mean. It doesn’t seem to cause any problem.

On Android phones, it’s an alternate input than hitting each key symbol. Instead, you drag your contact point through the letters of the word in sequence.

Good points. I typed 40 WPM in Junior High, probably 20 now. :slight_smile: