OMG... The Kids Can't Spell!

I'm 19 and I find it nearly impossible to even make myself use the terrible spelling that most around my age use. Something just doesn't feel right about it if I even consider it. People throw around the excuse of the small keyboards among other reasons. If they can't be bothered to put in a slight bit of extra effort, then what else are they not going to put the required effort towards.

But hey, maybe 1337 5p34k c0u1d b3c0m3 4n 0ff1c141 14ngu4g3


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Ok, I’m going to hold my hands up. I’m one of those who often makes spelling mistakes and no doubt countless grammar errors in my posts.

I even got a U2U from someone commenting “Is it JonoEnglish or DunoEnglish?” as in, “don’t know English!” I took it in jest, as it was intended that way and I’m not easily offended.

However, I see many posts by people on here often picking up on other members spelling mistakes or grammar errors, that seem to shout ignorance and intellectual supremacy on behalf of the person making them comments towards the other member.

They ignore what the person is saying and instead judge them on how they’ve constructed their written, sorry typed response or thread.

My granddad couldn’t write, he even had trouble writing his own name, coming from a generation that went straight to work at an early age. He certainly wasn't daft or stupid and did indeed have opinions. Should those be ignored?

Who are we to judge the background of other members?

We aren’t submitting text to be judged on spelling or grammar, just the context of what's being said.

Those that claim that posts are hard to follow or understand, well, I’ve read many of those yet you can get the jist of what people are trying to say. It doesn’t make their opinion any less worthy.

We accept differences in the speech patterns through differing accents and the use of local terms or phrases in speech, yet as soon as it is set in word that is deemed as a bad reflection on that person’s intellect.

I know many people who can write in perfect “English”, yet can be at times, well to put it bluntly, stupid, ignorant and wrong.


Edited for bad grammar...anyone who points out more...you die

reply to post by JonoEnglish


You are 100% correct. It should not matter how something is written, unless it is written in text speak; I won't even bother reading posts written that way. As long as posters make an effort, who cares if they spell something incorrectly? We all make mistakes and often people are in a hurry to write their posts. It's really not a big deal. This is a site for discussion of topics, not grading each other's posts.

What I find hilarious is when posters go off on others for poor grammar and make terrible grammatical errors of their own. I cannot resist replying to those posts.

Now that we are on this topic can someone tell me what these mean?

-kmt
-PS
-w00t
-pmsl
-rofl
-omdays

Originally posted by forklift
Now that we are on this topic can someone tell me what these mean?

-kmt
-PS
-w00t
-pmsl
-rofl
-omdays

The one I wasn't sure about was gilf...just don't do a google on that one..."shudders"...nasty.

I prepared a report for a school district about their water supply. I didn't have time to proof read the final copy before my boss took the document and presented it to the school district. This was a 20 page document with a few charts and/or graphs.

The school district was outraged because I misspelled 3 words. The reality was that they didn't like the alternatives that I presented but my engineering was sound so the only thing they could criticize was the spelling.

Now, thank goodness, we have spell checker.

Originally posted by JonoEnglish

Originally posted by forklift

The one I wasn't sure about was gilf...just don't do a google on that one..."shudders"...nasty.

Didn't sound as bad as you made out.

Originally posted by JohnnyTHSeed

Originally posted by Kharron
reply to post by Kangaruex4Ewe

 

I just watched a laundry detergent commercial (think it was Gain) where they claim it will make your day 'gooder'

I don't even know what to say... it's almost like they're trying to make everyone 'more stupider'.

I know for one, I will not be picking up any Gain, ever, just because of that commercial.

Khar

Last I heard, reading books is the best way to strengthen your vocabulary, not texting out full words like "you too".

If you text it, and you use your eyes, then you are also reading it. Regardless if in a book or on a phone you have thus read your txt. You have just contradicted yourself.

I think that proper spelling and grammar in any language is an essential component of being understood.
I liken this to music (the universal language). A Bb is always Bb and C# is always C#. If you play anything else or are out of tune it will be obvious you are either incompetent, mistaken or both.

Originally posted by howmuch4another
I think that proper spelling and grammar in any language is an essential component of being understood.
I liken this to music (the universal language). A Bb is always Bb and C# is always C#. If you play anything else or are out of tune it will be obvious you are either incompetent, mistaken or both.

So do you speak the Queen's English my friend?

Would you take offense, if whilst speaking to someone, they corrected you on how you say things?
Or would you tell them to pash off?

Originally posted by LucidDreamer85

Originally posted by JohnnyTHSeed
Last I heard, reading books is the best way to strengthen your vocabulary, not texting out full words like "you too".

If you text it, and you use your eyes, then you are also reading it. Regardless if in a book or on a phone you have thus read your txt. You have just contradicted yourself.

I said that reading books is the best way to strengthen vocabulary. Where is the contradiction?

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/2ef377ddc802.jpg[/atsimg]

Texts are going to have a negligible effect on vocabulary when compared to other sources of reading.

reply to post by JohnnyTHSeed


Language develops, we all have different standards. Lets take shakespear...enough said..mad 'get'! ( local dialect)

As long as you can understand what a person is sayng, what's the problem? That's what questions are for.

reply to post by JonoEnglish


You are preaching to the choir brother. Unfortunately our song falls mostly on deaf ears. You dig?

reply to post by JonoEnglish


If I were in a society that had that as the standard. I totally agree that things evolve but the foundation is critical. Slang is often misunderstood within any given dialect because the foundation is skewed but can eventually become part of the mainstream language. The next generation always manifests changes in language but its' acceptance to society is slow and IMHO must maintain the foundation.

A new language is being born. If you look at the evolution of language it is now changing at an astronomical rate.

I didn't like it at first either, but it is actually a lot more time efficient. I now have a 1.5 year old and she fully understands how to navigate an ipad. She has figured out how to purchase apps, utilize netflix to find what ever show she wants to watch, and play games. I don't know what language she is going to speak but if I want to communicate with her I had better learn it.

reply to post by Kangaruex4Ewe


Considering the spelling of your Avataar you really shouldn't be saying much. Also why sould the children. I find it funny you didn't use spell check on a thread OP about spelling and grammar mistakes. Sorry I couldn't help it

I don't think it's good. Paring down language for efficiency makes it lose its colorful and elegant decriptive powers.
Has anyone here read Orwell's 1984 with it's 'Newspeak'. I think slang, or text is O.K. for chatting, but for ENGLISH, there should set rules for writing. Just as in APA or MLA formatting(for formal discourse.)

If I see a title with texting or misspelled words in it, I skip over it. If the person typing it doesn't bother checking over his message before sending it, then I doubt the topic and content of the message will have been researched as it should have been.
Now, this depends on the misspelling of course, but when I see an 'OMG you must see this' in the title, it gets no attention from me.
I use a Blackberry Curve while on the road, and with its minuscule keyboard, I can still type correct words. Maybe its because I was the city spelling bee champion 2 years running in my town when I was in school, but I simply hate to see the wholesale butchering of the english language.

I'm not a language professional, but in my job capacity, one of the things I do is read resume's from potential employees. Some of the resume's are outright hilarious, (Central hi skool comes to mind) and of course these people are denied an interview. Maybe that isn't the right attitude, and these people may do incredible things for our company, but that's just how it is.
First impressions are lasting, and in my case the first impression I get is the resume. If your resume shows that you can't spell, or try to take shortcuts in your writing, what will you do if I hire you? Take shortcuts on your job? I don't think so.

snrRog

To continue, let's get some things straight.

Speaking does not equal writing as oral communication has been around since the dawn of the species while written language has only existed for a few millenia in a few isolate spots, only to explode in the last couple centuries as more and more "oral" communities entered the written age.

However, writing can and does influence speaking. How do you know how to say a word you've never seen before? In English, you use clues that are somewhat - but not totally - reliable.

For example, if I gave you the word "bood" would you pronounce the double "oo" as in "blood", as in "book" or as in "food".

In Spanish, where every vowel and grouping of vowels are 100% predictable, this problem does not exist with heretofore unencountered words by the reader. This doesn't mean that Spanish speakers do not have trouble spelling, just that their issues are few and far between compared with English.

Chinese uses an ideographic system, where those symbols we have all seen can have more than one pronunciation, but the meaning (even when metaphorical in groupings) is more or less constant. So, spelling does not exist, per se, in Chinese, though "good" caligraphy would be a comparable notion.

Back to the main point of the OP

As an instructor, I certainly agree about the spelling, but I will go beyond that to units of meaning in and of themselves.

My high school senior-year English teacher was a stickler for things like "should of" and "could of" instead of the contraction. It's a total realignment of meaning based on sound...I could have gone. I could of gone. Interesting, but in this case, despite the confusion, the meaning is maintained with little difficulty and many read this to mean 've (have) in texts anywhere in the country.

However, as a Spanish teacher, it is difficult that students have to ask me what "astuto" or "extrovertido" mean. These are the easy ones and we're talking college kids. They should understand what a cognate is with no explanation. If I say it, it is one thing because the sounds are not the same for Spanish "d" and English "d" (for example), but if they read it...c'mon...

My fear, going beyond Spelling, is a total delexification of the language, if you will. A complete reduction of vocabulary of the Newspeak type, where ads, TV shows and computer programs are narrowing the spectrum of thought by narrowing the ammount of necessarily words for communication to take place.

I really never thought that Newspeak was possible, but I was focused on the institutionalization aspect of it, where a "ministry" was in charge of recalibrating the language. Naturally, as with most good conspiracies, it's really a combination of complacency and societal shift. No single person or small organized body could every orchestrate the "dumbing" down of a language community the size of English speakers. What we are seeing, however, is a total societal transformation (at least in the US) whereby the speakers are re-synchronizing themselves around a new set of media which uses their language in a new and more limited way.

The spelling concerns are really trivial when it all comes down to it because no matter whether you spell through as "thru", "throo", "through" or "throhg" we are all really still saying "through".

reply to post by LucidDreamer85


This is what I mean, spelling does not equal vocabulary. I have seen PhDs in linguistics misspell words. I've misspelled words that are too simmilar in sound. There are some that are easily missed (their vs. there) and some that should sound an alarm bell (they're = they are).

Vocabulary is an antequated word. It means the storage of words in you mind's inventory. Words are not stored by how they are spelled, they are stored by what they mean and how that meaning relates to other words in your vocabulary through those meanings.

In other words, you would not find the words ant, basket, lemonade, macaroni salad and picnic alphabetized in that same order as in a dictionary, you would find them, perhaps, linked together, where ant also links to bite, small, etc. and macaroni salad links to potato salad, BBQs, Sunday afternoon perhaps, etc.

Consider, for example, that in the US we spell the word skeptical, while in the UK they spell it sceptical...in either case we both know what we mean and we mean the same thing. We both spell "schedule" the same, but I would say SKedule while they will say SHedule...that is along the lines of the spelling affecting the pronunciation. Nevertheless, the meaning remains constant.