How series can you take threads with misspellings in title?

[AhabsOtherLeg]

I daesnaote ken this shite at all waetimes, ney.

Aye. Yur right enough.



Maybe we should start a slang/acronym thead.

The Yorkshire bastards done that a while back. They all talked Yorkshire for a while in a thread.

I'm still bitter about it. Cheeky Donald Ducks.

[stefano]

the red-underlining on this board annoyed me so much I kept going back and changing my spelling to the American

You're using Firefox, I think I remember you saying once? Get the British English dictionary here. They've got everything from Afrikaans to Zulu (also Ndebele, Sepedi, Sesotho, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa and "South African English", very SA-friendly for some reason). Then when you type, select all your text, right-click and at the bottom of the menu you get "Languages", pick the one you're writing in.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

The Zanu-PF dictionary is weird.

Defeat (verb) : A resounding victory for our Glorious Leader.

What's that all about?

[Project Willow]

The use of the possessive 'your' in place of the conjunction 'you're' is absolutely terrible. I've seen Brit bloggers do it as well, so it's not just dumb Americans.

Give me some low hanging fruit out of a kilt any day, wink-wink, LOL (I Like that too.)

[chiggerbit]

Hey, more men need to wear knives in their socks.

[§ê¢rꆧ]

For those who need a short refresher on grammar, I cannot recommend enough a book called "The Elements of Style." This tiny book will get you on the road to better spelling and grammar painlessly.

You can read it here (33 pages online)

http://www.esnips.com/doc/d033a533-5a45 ... s-of-style

[AlicetheKurious]

the red-underlining on this board annoyed me so much I kept going back and changing my spelling to the American

You're using Firefox, I think I remember you saying once? Get the British English dictionary here. They've got everything from Afrikaans to Zulu (also Ndebele, Sepedi, Sesotho, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa and "South African English", very SA-friendly for some reason). Then when you type, select all your text, right-click and at the bottom of the menu you get "Languages", pick the one you're writing in.

I did it! Only I installed the Canadian English dictionary (I didn't know it was distinct from the British...).

Your going to see a hole new Alice now!

[chiggerbit]

Here's another useful link for those who want to brush up on their skills:

http://www.archive.org/stream/moderntec ... p_djvu.txt

[monster]

One of my recent pet peeves, is the double "is" people use when speaking... e.g.

"The thing I noticed is, is that..."
"The point is, is that..."
etc.

I am hearing this everywhere now. I first noticed it because the guy in the office across from mine does it all the time. Now I notice it in almost every podcast I listen to (mostly C2C).

[freemason9]

I dunno man. I know what you mean, grammar and punctuation and spelling do matter. The problem is, with me, I totally tuned out of school in 2nd grade. I was a little asshole. So I never studied for spelling tests. Which means there are certain words I'll never spell correctly on my own. Thank heavens for spell-check. I generally copy and paste into Word before I post anything. Sometimes I am in a rush, though, and I know I come off looking like an idiot. Whatever. If that's how people judge me, fine, I've done worse things.

Probably, and those are the very things I'd like to hear about.

[Elvis]

What especially drives me nuts is seeing an apostrophe in what should be the possessive "its"; "it's" is always a contraction of "it is." So a good way to check that is to read your sentence to see if "it is" is what you intended---that is, whether you meant the possessive "its" or the contraction for "it is."

Some good writers make this mistake, but to my eye it separates them from professional writers (although I am seeing more and more of it from paid online writers).

There's a good explanation of its/it's here:
http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1215284

(I've mentioned this pet peeve before, at the risk of being a dull pendant, but this thread emboldened me to repeat it.)

My two opening sentences above call to mind the question of putting a comma or period inside or outside quotation marks. I think it's a difference between American and British styles. The British (obstinately, hehe) put the period after the quote mark, while the American style---pretty much always---is to put the period before the quote mark.


Now in regard to "LOL," somewhere I got the impression that LOL is an old ham radio shorthand expression that carried over to online usage. If you're tapping out Morse code, "LOL" is a lot faster and easier than "That was so funny I'm laughing out loud!" Any hams out there know about that?

And to Jack---can't resist nitpicking (ahem, 'LOL'): "Washington State" is the university, while distinguishing "Washington state" from Washington, D.C. uses lower case for "state."

The Associated Press StyleBook and Libel Manual (I got the "state" usage from it when writing something years ago) is an excellent reference for that sort of thing. I urge anyone who takes their writing seriously to have a copy handy. I also agree that "Elements of Style" is an excellent reference, besides being a hoot to read.

Ok, a quick proof-read and spell check and I'm outta here. Thanks for the interesting thread!

[Seamus OBlimey]

Like Brainy sez..



Fuggin pedants.. sorry, but you try saying peasants with no front teeth.

[marmot]

Entertaining thread here.

I don't understend how someone can post speling mistikes, since they get undrlined in red as you type them, and if you rihgt-click teh red-underlined words, you get a list of the options corectly-spelled. It's not about education, it's about being lazy and careless.

I'm a horrible speller, and my mother always comforted me by saying that the inability to spell is a sign of intelligence (high or low she didn't stipulate).

Up until Alice educated me on the right-click option to the red-underlined words I was completely unaware of this nifty mechanism. I would just keep on hammering out possibilities until the red line disappeared. And sometimes, only after I exhausted myself with assumedly 'correct' possibilities I then googled the word and found that it was indeed a legitimate word as I had initially spelled it.

The word 'assumedly' is one such word that gets red-lined. So this frustrates me. See, it seems to me that this red-lining spell-checker is just outright stupid. I would tend to understand it not recognizing more technical words. Still, it should recognize legitimate inflections.

And then, of course, some of the red-lined words may be black-listed - in Orwellian fashion - in an attempt to scrub the subversive terms from our online lexicons. And then there are words like 'google' that get red-lined because (and this is the only explanation I can think of) it's a word of the competition.

I do have the spell-check turned off in my word-processor. Like Jack said:"Can't write with that crap on, policing my every word. Every word is underlined until you complete it, meaning that you are always provisionally wrong. Makes me want to murder MS executives. (Wait, did I say murder? Mercy kill! It's legal in Washington State!)" Made me laugh. When I'm done with a document I then run the spell-check.

Anyway. I was thinking today of two quotes regarding good writing I thought others would appreciate me sharing.

'Easy reading is hard writing.' - Nathaniel Hawthorne

and

'Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages [or words] you remove somehow remain.' - Ellie Wiesel in Writers and Writing

[barracuda]

This "Birther" Thing Has Gone To Far. Far, far to far, would say.

Sorry, that one is eating at my craw.

[Zap]

This "Birther" Thing Has Gone To Far. Far, far to far, would say.

Sorry, that one is eating at my craw.

I have been biting my fingers about that one. It shouldn't bother me, but man it does, every time I see it. I placate my inner grammar nazi by telling myself it was a typo, and the poster smacks his forehead whenever he sees it.