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I know there have been rants like this before, but I really need to vent about all the bad spelling and word usage I see online. It really gets to me after a while.
-Use of the verb "advise" when people really mean to use the noun "advice" 90% of the time.
-Misuse of they're, there, and their
-"Cloths" instead of "clothes"
-Use of the possessive pronoun "your" when you mean "you are", which, as a contraction, is spelled "you're".
-Use of the word "that" when referring to people instead of the word "who". E.G. "People that like sports"....instead of "People WHO like sports".This one really drives me nuts because people are not objects, and the word "that" is supposed to only refer to objects.
--"Suppose to" instead of "supposeD to".
--Skipping the use of the verb "to be" in a sentence. E.G. "This needs washed" instead of "This needs TO BE washed".
--Not dropping the "y" and adding "ies" when pluralizing. E.G. "familys" instead of "families".
--Dropping the "h" in words with a "wh" combination. E.G. "wether" instead of "whether". I have even seen "were" instead of "where" quite often.
--"Truely" instead of "truly"
--Use of "then" instead of "thAn". If people would prononce their words correctly, they would not make this mistake. If you pronounce the "a" in "than" the same way you pronounce the "a" in "apple", you'll never make this mistake.
I'm sure some will think I'm nuts, but I see a correlation here between the bad spelling, the majority overweight population, the poor performance of our schools relative to other developed countries, the high levels of debt most people have, etc. In general, the US, as a nation, lacks discipline; and it shows in a million ways, large and small. Poor spelling is just one of many indicators.
Yes!! And if you correct people they get all huffy and bent out of shape.
I normally don't make any of the errors you mention, but I make LOTS of other errors, and I'm GRATEFUL when someone takes the time to correct me. I also consistently make the SAME errors, over and over again.
What many people don't recognize--or don't want to recognize--is that the use of language is directly tied into how people judge you, how it reveals your intelligence and aesthetic sensibilities, and directly effects your work and social life. It's important.
I love to write, I always wanted to be writer, but things changed, I got fragged out during the wars and now I have a hard time keeping my mind still while trying to express my thoughts on a keyboard or notepad. It suxs but I'm ok with it..
--Skipping the use of the verb "to be" in a sentence. E.G. "This needs washed" instead of "This needs TO BE washed".
Turns out this usage is actually a perfectly well-educated but regional dialect thing. It came up in discussion on a writing forum, and quite a lot of history got unearthed in the process.
Another trend I witness is the combining of words that should not be. A prime example is the phrase 'no one', being spelled as 'noone. It's not like businessman, or weekday. (The CD spell check even underlined it in red for me!) That's what I don't get, is when something is underscored with a red line as you are typing, it's telling you something needs fixed.
No, the red line is telling you something needs to be fixed.
Turns out this usage is actually a perfectly well-educated but regional dialect thing. It came up in discussion on a writing forum, and quite a lot of history got unearthed in the process.
It's a regional dialect, but it's still not standard English.
It's a regional dialect, but it's still not standard English.
Well, technically there's no such thing as 'standard English'. There are only regionally-correct variants of English. The whole notion that there's One True English itself is only about 100 years old, and wouldn't itself exist if one particular dialect hadn't been written up and used by the educational system. It could just as easily have been a different dialect (and probably would have been, were it standardized, say, 200-300 years ago), and we'd instead regard as 'educated' the English dialect used by native speakers of Pennsylvania Dutch.
Now, I agree that it's helpful to use the standard dialect if you want to be understood; it's the common tongue that any educated person knows (much like Latin was a thousand years ago). But it doesn't make other regional dialects 'wrong'; they are not the same thing as willful ignorance.
If we were being utterly by-damn historically correct, we should never have lost, frex, the distinction between thou and you, not to mention the maze of declensions. English retains a lot of artifacts from that era (irregular plurals and the like) but the way we use them today would be glared at as barbaric by those who spoke the ancestor of modern English.
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