This is quite recent but I’ve been browsing Lemmy a bunch lately and quite often I see extreme grammatical errors.
I’m not talking about like, incorrect stylistic choices between commas and dashes, or an improper use of ellipses or missing commas or incorrect use of apostrophes in its/it’s or in multiple posessive articles or just plain typos or any nitpicky grammar nazi shit like that, but just basic spelling specifically.
It’s one thing when you can’t spell some pretty uncommon words and you’re too lazy to look it up and/or use autocorrect, but it’s a completely different league to misspell very basic words, very recently I saw someone spell “extreme” as “extream” which is just kind of baffling, I actually can’t even imagine how one would make such a mistake?
And it’s not been an isolated thing either, I’ve seen several instances like that lately.
Am I going crazy? Is it just me?
Increased reliance on touch screen devices with dodgy autocorrect probably accounts for a good chunk of it.
I know it is not uncommon for me to have to go back and edit something I wrote from my phone after I submit it because I didn’t see the autocorrect mistake before hitting send.
I got perfect scores in english and grammar throughout highschool, passed the ap test, perfect scores on english portions of sap/act, passed the ap test, therefore didn’t do any english/writing courses in college. (Gotten out of practice, when it comes to the correct way to type) I technically learned english 2nd and didn’tunderstand it in kindergarden so my internal logic has always been that I’ve proven myself and I don’t need to spell or use grammar correctly anymore.
I’ve already proven objectively that I have a firm grasp on the english language, so now I just let the errors fly. The logic is terrible, but i’ll go with whatever justifies my actions lol. People used to make fun of how I speakx so Id show them my grades and ask them if they are sure that they are the one speaking English correctly.
Also theres fr no reason to police spelling/grammar if the points gets across, being concise and clear is more important always.
Gen alpha hasn’t really been taught how to spell and they think grammar is stupid.
Worse: it’s common for the younger generation to reduce everything to three-letter, monosyllabic slang. “Mid” “on god” “no cap” there’s an intellectual laziness that’s trendy and it’s getting worse with time.
During the big wave of Among Us, it was also interesting to see “sus” become a popular term, probably because people don’t know how to spell “suspisus”.
I think it’s more that there’s limited time to talk in the meetings.
Oh
Bro didn’t live during sms era.
Are you sure?
Mine has always been bad, but autocorrect seems to be bipolar as the years pass.
it’s the mispeling vyrus
No you aren’t getting crazy. I stopped double checking my spelling after Trump became president the first time. Clearly most people don’t mind bad spelling so why bother?
Because it’s worth it to be better than they are and it fights entropy
I double check my writing because there are some “errors” that don’t matter (I stopped caring about “me” versus “I”) and then there are some errors that silently cause me to misinterpret the message
Like as an analogy if I ask how much milk is left in the carton in the fridge
- “haf” I know you mean half, no big deal
- “three” I know you didn’t read my question, frustrating but not the worst thing
- “full” but actually it was full three days ago when you last checked and this is stale information, and so I don’t buy another carton, then we’re out of milk because of a miscommunication
You know?
deleted by creator
It’s not just spelling, even online people don’t even bother using grammar. They literally stuff 4 different sentences in one line without using commas or periods. It’s maddening, honestly.
I absolutely loathe posts that just say something like “This dog.”
This dog WHAT, bozo.
My mobile spelling has gotten to be garbage because my phone keyboard autocorrects Sometimes and I’ve gotten lazy about Swype/deleting mid-word mistakes. My pen/paper and also physical keyboard spelling remains persnickety
See, I legitimately can’t even tell if you’re trolling or not.
I turned off autocorrect because it was changing valid words into other words. Having an obvious typo is preferable to changing the meaning completely, which happened enough times for me to notice.
my phone corrects “the” to “Tue”. Thanks phone, exactly what I was going for apparently
My phones autocorrect has been garbage recently. I feel like a few years ago, it was much better at predicting what I meant to type, and I could easily edit on mobile using the suggested corrections. But now it is worse. Even with words or names I use all the time.
Ditto. My older phone (Lineage 17) doesn’t have this problem, compared to my current (Lineage 20)
How long have you had it? it took my current keyboard 3ish months to be as good as gboard which I had been using for years.
I dont have the learn as you type features on, I just use the stock keyboard with stock dictionary
Mine autocorrects “the” to “ther” sometimes. Not even a damn word.
There’s a few I’ve noticed in the last seven years or so - lots of Americans can’t seem to conjugate “run”. It results in horrible sentences like “I used to ran this game” or “I have ran this event before”. No idea why that’s happening but squirt those people with a plant mister.
It’s even worse than people who don’t finish the words they’re writing “suppose to” and the like. In the brine with thee!
The distinction between simple past and past participle is disappearing in English more generally. I’m curious whether it will be considered quaint to distinguish them before I’m dead.
I’m always perplexed when I see porn videos with titles that use the continuous present rather than the simple present. One would have thought that the simple present would be the basic stuff for English as a second language, rather than the much less useful continuous present.
I speak a couple of languages in which there is no continuous present, but rather they use phrases such as “I sit and study Swedish” to mean “I’m studying Swedish (as in right now, that’s the task I’m doing)” or “I am in the process of reading a book”. They don’t change the form of the verb to highlight this continuous aspect, so perhaps they aren’t used to it.
Add to that that the continuous aspect in English is surprisingly complicated and arbitrary. If you try to nail down rules for how and when to use it, you might struggle. 😉 Folks struggling to use it correctly might be overcorrecting or merely confused.
There are, I’m sure, other reasons, but this is enough to account for some of what you’re seeing.
I make more spelling mistakes when autocorrect is on than when it’s off (and every little update to the os seems to re-enable it 😬) because it constantly wants to change words that were spelled correctly, to a different word that doesn’t fit the context.
There’s a strain of “cutesy” spelling going around where swapping vowels is somehow significant. I just put these people on the blocklist, they have nothing useful to say anyway.
English spelling rules, and some vocabulary and grammar, were mostly crystallized around the end of the 16th century, with the form kind of arbitrarily chosen to be (mostly) from southeast England.
English grammar rules and some spelling were asserted by fiat, by linguists who wanted English to be “more Latin.”
A while ago I became terribly aware of people writing things like “apostrope’s” to indicate plurality. I was pretty convinced that it was a new thing, but I’ve since found examples of people doing that far in the past! I’m not sure if they were doing it at the same rate but they had been doing it for a while.
I know that some foreign language speakers use this as part of their grammar, but they do so according to a rule system. The people I encounter doing this have only ever known american english and do so without any apparent consistency. If you’re going to alter your grammar in that way, at least make it consistent! Like these weirdos. Professionals have standards.
That’s [greengrocer’s apostrophe](greengrocers apostrophe https://g.co/kgs/1gWQ9nT)
