In the meantime, though, the communication impediments caused by ignorance of standard written language conventions can be pretty freaking hilarious.
I think it’s rather optimistic to assume that people who write idiosyncratically nonstandard English are always communicating successfully with their intended audiences, and it’s just the mean old grammar-nazi nitpickers who “don’t understand” them.
I understand perfectly well what they’re trying to say, I just think that their confusion about how to say it makes them sound a bit ridiculous.
True. Just like every other branch of print media, book publishing revenues are plunging and costs (read: editorial staff) are being cut to the bone. I suspect we’ll see more and more errors in print as time goes on.
I’m pretty chill about spelling mistakes, but the one that gets me is lose/loose.
The thing is, the scenarios in which the distinction matters are extremely rare (loose the houds/lose the hounds and the like is pretty contrived), but it still makes me roll my eyes.
Since we seem to have moved into a general collective grumblefest about misuse of written language, might I share my personal peeve? “Of” for the contraction “'ve”. So you get “would of, could of, should of” instead of “would’ve, could’ve, should’ve.” Drives me simply batty. There’s a pro wrestling fansite that I frequent that has an otherwise intelligent and literate commentariat, except for this particular error–it’s rampant. I fear that I’m going to get so used to seeing it I’ll start doing it myself…
Thirty-plus-year FT proofreader weighing in here: Copyeditors’ incompetence nowadays is frequently astounding (I have seen “a nervous tick” easily 10 times over the last 12 months), largely ‘cause of publishers’ belt tightening (hence, mostly disastrous design and editorial shortcuts in the book publishing process) and the relatively new technology of “electronic editing” (result: dozens of sentences in page proofs missing the word “to,” say, or sans any end punctuation whatsoever).
Plus frequently punishing “rush” schedules demanding entire books be edited in a week or two, and that the sloppy “first-pass” proof pages that result then be proofread, and sent back to the folks who are the (increasingly in-house: read “inexperienced”/“incompetent”) de facto typesetters, within a matter of days.
I’ve encountered page proofs where “formatting error” resulted in not a single word in a 350-page novel being set italic (Not a big deal, you say? Well, it is when it’s a friggin Star Trek novel), and ones where paragraph indentations have miraculously disappeared for pages at a time. And “Barak” Obama. And books with two "Chapter Four"s. And copyeditors who are used for years and years, despite not comprehending the difference between “taut” and “taught” (i.e., the former is the correct spelling to describe a woman’s nipples in a state of arousal), or that “gambit” and “gamut” are not synonymous. And this is for the NYC “majors” …
P.S. And it’s not merely grammar and spelling: fact-checking has largely gone the way of the dodo … Can you say “60 Minutes/Benghazi”??
Amen to that one. I know what’s meant, of course, but when I see people saying, for instance, that such-and-such politician might loose Massachusetts, my first mental image is always of a colossal bow with the state nocked on it, about to let fly.
Secondly, it’s not a question of my not being able to understand; it’s the pebble-in-the-shoe effect that the mis-usage has on my brain.
As an example, I recently spent a couple of weeks reading a pretty compellingly good story on a wordpress site; the author’s consistent use of “[something happened to] x and I” where proper usage would have been “[something happened to] x and me” caused me to have to suppress a tic of annoyance at her.
So did her use of “alright,” and her apparent belief that “grit” is an irregular verb like “hit” (*“I grit my teeth, hit the floor and scrambled out of the way”**).
This sentence does not appear in the story; it is merely included as an example of the form author’s misuse took.
Most of the attorneys I work with don’t know the difference between palpation and palpitation. This comes up when reviewing medical reports – No, the patient did not have pain when his or her heart went pitter-pat, he had pain when the doctor pressed on, or palpated, a body part, usually the low back.
And don’t even get me started on amenable and amendable!