I let it slide till it goes into Leetspeak.
Nope. I didn’t get whooshed.
Horton Hears Who’s?
Who’s on first.
Oh, yes, you did.
Why do you think so? I know he was being intentionally stupid.
Which makes your little diatribe kinda pointless. If he was being intentionally stupid, that means it was a joke; and if it was a joke, you can’t take it seriously.
Unless you have a big ol’ stick up your ass.
I think that there *is * a larger problem of growing illiteracy, but message boards may not be the appropriate place to judge that. Many people here are trying to sneak in a few posts during work or in the middle of a hectic day, and sometimes mistakes creep in by people who truly know better. I can’t believe the number of times I use the wrong there/their/they’re and only catch it in the preview. And it’s easy to gloss over the preview in one’s haste to post a timely response. In general, I think that most Straight Doper’s are, like the children from Lake Wobegon, above average (whether I share their beliefs or not) so it may be worth cutting folks a bit of slack.
(Airman Doors, USAF, I’m not familiar with a previous thread on this, but someone disagreeing with you may not be denouncing you. I happen to share your despair over declining literacy, but I’m not going to call anyone stupid for disagreeing with me.)
Forget it Marge, you won’t effect there grammer.
Writing is the truest form of literacy. Barring typos it is indicative of your command of the language.
True enough, but the same errors consistently appear, and are often made by the same people.
And we’ll start with you. The first portion of the quoted sentence is the equivalent of “In general, I think that most Straight Doper is are”. You made a possessive out of a plural, and that is Egregious Sin Number One.
The proper use of language is not a disagreement.
One error I’m starting to see a lot is “I was pouring over an old book…”
WTF? What do people think they are pouring?
The midnite oil?
I’m a little confused by your post, then. It almost seems like you were saying “I know you were joking when you said ‘irregardless’, but sheesh, you are an idiot for using ‘irregardless.’”
Now that I’m finished being an ass about this, let me explain why it bothers me so much.
I am a Communications/Journalism student, and one of the requirements of my University is that everyone within the major must pass a literacy test. Before I dropped my schedule for the semester due to my upcoming deployment I took the pre-test, which was similar in content to the actual test.
Out of 30 people in my class, I was one of four who passed it. Four! In a Communications major! That is utterly appalling. What’s worse, the syllabus that the teacher passed out to the class was riddled with errors. How can you expect a student to perform if you cannot be expected to have a proper grasp of what it is you are teaching?
People are not learning how to write. People are not learning how to read. People are not learning how to effectively communicate. We are forced to divine meaning when the meaning should be clear. We have made a cottage industry out of language, with copy editors to cover up mistakes and lawyers to pore over documents to ensure that there are no substantive mistakes. If we were taught properly there would be no need for such measures.
Yes, I am a grammar Nazi. If people are unable or unwilling to see that they made a mistake I make it a point to educate them. If that makes me an asshole, well, so be it. I expect people to do the same for me, because while I am not perfect I make every effort to improve my command of the language.
In many cases, it is. There are many, many points on which even experts disagree. Case in point is the perennial “Another think coming” vs. “Anothing thing coming” debate. Clearly, there is room for debate in the proper use of language. Language is not an absolute. It is constantly evolving. You may disagree, but I suspect Shakespeare and his contemporaries would find your usage of the language to be abhorrent.
Seeing these common mistakes here are worse then nails on a chalk board. I wish people would stop, than I wouldn’t have to cringe so much.
(Gaaah! It actually made me cringe to type that.)
I appreciate the zeal with which you attempt to make the world a better place. However, in your enthusiastic state, you berated someone for spelling things wrong while deliberately ignoring the intent of the post. Let’s just say the ironing is deciduous. 
I did, and it is. What can I say? I screwed up. It’s not one that I am unfamiliar with; I’ve read “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” as well, and I know how much it grates on the author. I think it proves my point as to posting quickly, you think it proves your point as to illiteracy. Perhaps we should agree to disagree.
Bolding mine. Insults are hardly evidence of a logical rebuttal, especially as all those posting to this thread (in jest or not) share Large Marge’s distaste for grammatical errors. Egregious Debating Sin Number One. I think that you are carrying on a battle with those who share your beliefs. Good luck with that.
Simple rule, folks: Possessive pronouns do not have apostrophes!
Look, I admit that most possessives do. But just like “his”, “her”, “my”, and the oft-misused “its”, “whose” is apostrophe-free.
Normally I’m all about defending usages that English teachers condemn. But there’s a difference between simply using casual speech, or speaking a native dialect that isn’t precisely the same as Standard English (as we all do) and just plain not knowing how to write. The distinctions between “its” and “it’s”, or “whose” and “who’s”, are matters of writing correctly, not prescriptive grammar. No one is a native speaker of a dialect that misspells “whose”. It’s nonsense to apply the arguments of grammatical description (“language always evolves”, “this rule is arbitrary”, and so forth) to writing, since writing by its very nature as a learned behavior and not a natural one like speech is largely arbitrary. Using punctuation correctly, spelling words right, and so forth, are essentially outside the purview of descriptive grammar anyway, since linguistics concentrates almost exclusively on speech.
I have to say that I think there must be far too little attention paid to this in high school composition classes, because this is a simple matter that should not be so puzzling to so many people. It irritates the hell out of me that many college students can’t apply basic rules of writing.
Okay, me first. You capitalized “University” and “Communications” and “Journalism” in your post, and you shouldnta oughtnta done that.