Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics.
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
…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.