No Stupid Questions

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

Mine has always been bad, but autocorrect seems to be bipolar as the years pass.

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.

I make mistakes because my replies are often my stream-of-consciousness, and the primary review is mainly to make sure I even want to reply to the comment at all. I don't use autocorrect so my fingers slip frequently.

If you look through my comment history, a good chunk are edited because I catch more grammatical errors in my comment after I post. I suppose most others don't bother.

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.

I know for me, I'm having more difficulty because of failing eyesight. If you can't see the word you can't perceive you've spelled it incorrectly.

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?

There is a mountain of anecdotal evidence, and a small mound of scientific research, suggesting that psychedelics can improve creativity even in the long term. Ask your doctor if LSD or psilocybin might help with your imagination deficit.

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

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!

I have turned metrics off on my phone keyboard and I swear it fucks up my choices.

tze fone keebord iz wery smol

itz werry deefeekult tuu tipe vordz korrektly

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"

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.

I think there are a few things happening.

More and more individuals are contributing to the Internet through social media rather than simply consuming. They are bringing their (lack of) spelling and grammar with them, resulting in the variety of mistakes you've noticed.

At the same time I have noticed more and more mistakes appearing in "professional" publications. I don't ever recall seeing a typo on an NPR website up until the past 1-2 years. Now I see grammatical and spelling mistakes almost everywhere.

I'm guessing it's a combination of laying off editors and using AI.

But at the end of the day, if a language isn't evolving, it's dead.

Most of my stupid spelling mistakes, missing words, and other typing errors are because I developed the terrible habit of proofreading only in the instant between hitting the post button and the subsequent UI refresh. The better my lemmy host is running, the lower the readability of what I've posted.

I've also noticed that muscle memory does some strange stuff to my typing. Like in the first sentence of this comment I typed "instance" rather than "instant." I meant instant but, since I work with AWS 5 days a week, my fingers autopiloted instance because I type it much more often.

I'm guilty of all these. I'm dyslexic and have a hard time spelling. At some point the personal dictionary on my phone learns words and I don't get the warning anymore.

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?

I switched to Heliboard and the autocorrect just isn't as good as gboard. It's worth it for me for the privacy but I have to constantly reread my messages

I've noticed the same thing, including on stuff that should be spell checked like news articles. Its not even rare. I've also noticed my phone (current android) it has been making it nearly impossible to overrule errant spelling even if it is not correctly changing it.

Overall I believe its entirely the lack of proof reading. Please god I proof read this let it contain no errors.