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Spelling, punctuation, and the use of contractions. The part that really sells the irritation factor is when they try to say they’re correct by making up some definition for what they said or claiming “common usage”. I guess it’s because people don’t really read much anymore. Reading someone else’s words that have been carefully edited, corrected into good sentence structure, and spellchecked can really help get it your own head.
They place the burden on the reader to decipher their made-up vocabulary. It really isn’t too awful, it’s just that people have to have read the correct way something is used yet insist on not changing.
Language is what is spoken/written.
I don't think any serious linguists are prescriptivists.
There are agreed upon standards for some contexts (eg: academic papers, newspaper articles, legal texts) but for casual conversation that doesn't really apply.
Relevant xkcd. Sort of makes the opposite case, though.maybe you're just not the one they want to be communicating with.
That’s not really what I’m talking about. I don’t care about whatever the latest slang is or the shorthand we use while texting, that’s fine. It’ll all be different again in 20 years.
I mean just the basics. “Could of” instead of could’ve, can’t figure out “too” or “to”. They’re, their, there. Stuff that should have been sorted out before middle school.
But that is what Randall's talking about. People who often read and write with text speech and frequent misspellings and such actually score better at spelling and grammar tests. It's not that they don't know how to do better, it's that they're choosing not to. That's how their audience communicates, so it's how they do too.
…and I disagree with that MO too. Because your audience chooses to write poorly or cannot spell I disagree that “dumbing yourself down” to perpetuate it or popularize yourself is helpful. That’s why I find it irritating. I’m not trying to make a sweeping discussion where we go down the rabbit hole of how intelligent people have to talk like “normal” people or how a politician might try to speak differently to pander to an audience, I get stuff like that happens. However, the point of this whole thread was essentially about what pisses us off. This is mine. If I had accepted the rationalizations for people being unwilling/-able to correctly use language learned prior to middle school I wouldn't have posted this.
E: and I very much disagree that poor spelling and grammar is any stereotypical indication of someone’s skill regarding spelling because they’ve deliberately chosen to write poorly. A quick trip through plenty of forums other than tech-minded people like Nextdoor, mechanical-related, or even Facebook will turn up plenty of material from people that didn’t or shouldn’t have made it out of high school.
You do know that you do it too, right? Even many words being spelled "correctly" and used "logically" have changed in meaningful ways. It might annoy when someone now says "I'm literally dying" after a joke, but once upon a time "incredible" meant "totally lacking credibility" and not "amazing". Language changes. In French, you negate a verb by saying "not verb step". Taken literally, it's the same meaningless gibberish as "could of," yet it's good enough for l'Académie Française while "could of" is abhorrent? I get that it's not how you'd like to communicate, and not how you'd like others to communicate with you, but it also isn't inherently bad or undesirable, since clearly that is how many people communicate.
So communicate the way you prefer, and make it known that you'd prefer that. But also, don't tell others they're wrong for reasons that are, ultimately, just as arbitrary as theirs.
I’m not interested in a tu quoque discussion.
This thread isn’t /changemymind, this is “what pisses you off”.
I’ve made my reasons clear.
I don’t think you understand “arbitrary.” The process of applying standard spelling to words began in the mid-1500s, whereas how you spelled a word prior the formalization of the words in these early “dictionaries” was indeed arbitrary. The efforts to standardize English are the exact opposite of arbitrary.
You should've been in this thread. You would've loved it.
https://lemmy.world/comment/9858709
Language is always going to change over time. There’s not much anyone can do about it, whether they like it or not. And if you understand what is being said, does it really matter? There have been language mistakes that have slowly been formalized into written language in the past, and I’m sure that will continue into the future.
IMO writing is only really ‘wrong’ if it doesn’t convey the intended meaning or tone (which I’m sure happens a fair amount as well)
That there is a poynt wear convursashun stawps beeng abowt kommewneekashunn and just being about perfectionism,racism and control freaking on others.
You can control yourself or let us control your delicate emotions with mere misspellings.
You can always choose not to read it and move on.
Stop grammar trolling and looking for dog whistle excuses to be racist to non native English speakers.
I usually find that non natives write better English than the natives do.
‘English must not be your first language’ is a racist insult.
Non-native English speakers don't have this problem because they actually learn proper English. The problem is people who speak it naturally and don't give a damn about proper English. After a certain point it becomes less inclusive to spew out near unreadable gibberish like the beginning of your reply.
Lemmy gold should be a thing, or like, badges we could give to awesome comments, that refill for free every week. If they were, I'd give you one for sure, as a non-native English speaker, the message you were responding to was so incomprehensible to me, I just read like a line or two, and went to your response, to try and infer by context clues what the walking, talking, aneurism of a person you were responding to, even said.
Maybe this will serve in the mean time:
Sounds like you understewd.
I think you worked harder on that response than you needed to, yet simultaneously, not hard enough.