rigorousintuition.ca

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This may be unwarranted snobbery, or the oversensitive plaint of a fellow who once believed books still mattered... and more recently I've taken to starting every e-mail with the proper salutation, "Dear ___," in the hope that this will help make me less of an everyday troll.

And it may just be a big waste of time... but...

If there's anything that makes me sneer, dismiss and ignore, it's misspellings in the thread title. In the post, fine. Nothing against people who can't spell certain words. But not in the title. It's fairly reliable as a measure of the poster, too. Am I unfair?

Among these misspellings is the frequent failure to put a space after a comma.

I can't help always seeing the misspelled ones every time I look at the board. It hits me like it was litter. There's several of them on right now. I do forgive nathan28 for "unconvuluted" though. He's a smart guy, in his posts. Maybe it's an indicator that the offending post (which I haven't clicked on) looks to be a bit flame-y.

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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.

*furtively checking my thread titles*

I do not take them seriesly at all. *tosses hair*

Is it something I sed?

Sig lines are the worst, kidz.

Yeah. Why is that?

IF I MISP3L SOMATHNG ITS TEH COMPUTERS FAULT NOBODY KNOWS HOW 2 SPEL ANYMORE I UES SPEL CHEK WTF

I'm a snob. I try to curtail my compulsion to correct people. I shudder when "u" is substituted for "you." I can't text message. I hate it. The young'ns today can't spell, can't punctuate - can't write. I do the best I can, but I draw the line at "loose/looser" for "lose/loser." I can't help but let loose and make that correction.

I cannot stand the use of LOL.

I will not reply if someone writes it to me.

It is fucking idiotic.

Picture someone alone literally laughing out loud at even half of the marginally funny shit that gets so tagged online. You are picturing a moron.

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.

Ha, even where there are no spelling mistakes I get snobbish when people confuse homonyms; I've a special little thing about people who write "principle" instead of "principal". Such a nerd...

Poor grammar, spelling and puncuation definitely catch my attention and color my view but then I look at the content and all can be and sometimes is forgiven if the thoughts expressed are insightful, cogent and/or clever. I try to keep in mind people might have learning disabilities or they may have been raised in a language poor environment. For myself, I try to make my writing here as clean as possible not simply because I'm sort of persnickety about it but because I want to avoid having my thoughts dismissed out of hand. I always preview and clean up my posts before I submit. It doesn't take that long and it signals to the reader that I care about what I write.

AK wrote:It's not about education, it's about being lazy and careless.

That's probably true to a certain extent AK, but it is worth keeping in mind that our brains get wired for language as children.

I'm always shocked when I see statistics on the literacy rate in America. It's appalling.

Yeah, I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, I've studied a fair bit of English, grammar, etc. and for the most part know what is considered 'correct' - except in the extreme gray areas where there are differences of opinion (does the comma go INSIDE the quotation or OUTSIDE the quotation?).

OTOH, the peculiarities of ppl's writing, and the various shorthand they use, FWIW, are what make their posts uniquely their voice. Forum posts are usually more relaxed and conversational than many other forms of writing, and so it is natural for people to relax a bit and not let the mechanics get in the way of what they are trying to say.

I love LOL, for this reason. That's some of the oldest Net jargon, and I think it serves an important purpose. But people that append it to everything they say, LOL, I agree can get a bit annoying, LOL, you know, LOL...

I would never presume to correct anyone's spelling, punctuation or grammar.....well, unless they started a thread which fussed about other people's spelling, punctuation or grammar:

There's several of them on right now

"There's" is a contraction of "there is", which is singular, when the sentence required a plural. Thanks for the giggle, Jack.

Maybe we should explore this a little further. Do you have a problem with the way the Brits on the board use standardised English English, as opposed to, say, those of us who use standardized American English?