No Stupid Questions

I feel like it's gotten better. I certainly don't miss the days of "definately". I feel like that one was everywhere. Its death is maybe the one good thing auto-correct did for the world.

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.

I swear to god working in an engineering field for the past 10 years or so has dramatically changed my grammar. Do you know who has the absolute worst grammar and spelling of anyone I've ever met? My boss. "First 2 channels shoul dBe woired for 0-10vDC" was a note he left on my desk yesterday. Do you know who's the smartest person I've ever met when it comes to electrical? Also my boss.

It's never a 1 to 1 comparison of intelligence fwiw. Everyone in this field spits out emails in half-cobbled together sentences and phrases and it just works somehow. When I type out multiple paragraphs and overexplain things, half the time they'll just come down to the shop to talk instead.

But yeah I have realized that this will bleed out into the rest of my communication haha. I'll look back at texts I send quickly to my fiance and see that I'm skipping words or saying shit wrong. Oh well, the ideas are communicated just as well most the time.

Could be people using a second language like others have mentioned. Another thing could be British vs US english. Webster changed how words were spelt in the early 20th centry to make them more phonetic for Americans, i.e. "colour" -> "color"

My phone is stupid and will automatically correct on its own to giggerish or to other words that makes no sense. That's why I do so many edits. I don't always catch the errors.

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.

It also seems to be on the rise in online publications. Both spelling errors and synonym/grammar issues have increased significantly over the last year, most significantly in the last 3-4 months.

Gen alpha hasn't really been taught how to spell and they think grammar is stupid.

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?

In my case, autocowreck is the main reason for incorrect spelling and grammar.

I, mean its only. Natural that weerd thangs criep into comments here und their

But it's been something increasing over time. Some of it is people just not paying attention, some of it is them relying on autocorrect and not spending the time to check what gets autoed. But, a lot of it is that people can't spell for shit, and don't care that they can't.

And, to be fair, as long as the basic idea of what you're saying gets across, how much effort is required? In your example, extreme vs extream, while one is correct, they both sound the same, and they even read the same. So if a person is just approximating the sound of the word, and never ran across it, do they have an obligation to go looking?

Now, obviously, extreme would be an unusual word to never have seen in print since it was over used in marketing for a long time. I'd expect xtreme to be the misspelling to show up. But even with a word that over saturated, does it matter?

I say no, it doesn't really matter. Yeah, I'd still offer someone the correct spelling, but that's just as a point of conversation rather than any obligation they have to spend their time and energy on vocabulary and/or spelling. As long as they aren't giving me shit for having put in time and effort into mine, and it's close enough to guess; or they're willing to communicate about that they meant if it isn't easy to guess.

For real, it does make my brain scream at me when I run across it. But that's my problem, not theirs.

Seriously, not everyone cares enough to edit it up. Why should they?

I'm not native English. It's imperfect English or writing in other language that not many would fully understand.

If you’re talking about my messages, it’s because I swipe too fast and don’t check the message 9 times before posting. All sorts of weird nonsense slips through every day, some of which I edit later.

If you’re talking about how native English speakers spell, you’ll find all sorts of weird mistakes that seem to stem from the fact that English is pure chaos, and navigating this mess is about as easy as programming with a magnetized needle and a hard disk platter. The way I see it, mispronouncing every word in a consistent manner helps me remember how they are written. The trick is to use a consistent spelling system of another language to form an auditory memory of the spelling.

So in my mind, every word comes with three entries: what the word means, how it’s pronounced and how it’s written. Memorizing a combination of letters is hard, but memorizing a funny sound that you can later decrypt back to a sequence of letters is easier. That connection has to be 100% consistent, which is exactly what English can’t offer, but many other languages come pretty close.

If your first language happens to have a fairly consistent spelling system, you can totally use it to memorize how English words are spelled. Native English speakers are obviously completely screwed, and that’s why spelling bees are a thing and why this post exists.

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.

My online grammar and spelling is like a drunkard has taken over my keyboard. Swiping is awful for accuracy

W3 g01ng b@ck 2 typ31ng 1n l33t?

Idk i ditnt notise anyting unujual

The Android keyboard always worked well for me, but I don't trust them one bit. So I changed my phone keyboard into something that is worse at guessing what I'm trying to say, but I'm somewhat confident I am not being surveilled through it.

I started using it a month or two ago, and ever since I have started making a billion typos when writing on mobile.

Also, I guess the demography of the communities you're in matters. I think quite a few of us over here are not native speakers. Sometimes I'll also write with my keyboard set to the wrong language by accident, "leasing to all mines" of freaky autocorrects.