This is quite recent but I’ve been browsing Lemmy a bunch lately and quite often I see extreme grammatical errors.
I’m not talking about like, incorrect stylistic choices between commas and dashes, or an improper use of ellipses or missing commas or incorrect use of apostrophes in its/it’s or in multiple posessive articles or just plain typos or any nitpicky grammar nazi shit like that, but just basic spelling specifically.
It’s one thing when you can’t spell some pretty uncommon words and you’re too lazy to look it up and/or use autocorrect, but it’s a completely different league to misspell very basic words, very 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?
And it’s not been an isolated thing either, I’ve seen several instances like that lately.
Am I going crazy? Is it just me?
No, I think you does have point, I’ve been sawing that, too.
Look at Mr fancy pants here using punctuation like yer some kinda edumacated person of learneding
I scenes it to scenes it many time. OP is rite is got extream. Happnd all the sudden to
Youse*
Et oak thoug we awl mess that juan.
It’s not a recent thing, but I would say there has been a decline over the last decade or so. Not only does it seem like spelling and grammar are getting worse but I feel it is much more likely these days to find comments defending improper English rather than correcting it.
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?
Maybe they had just come from dealing with large quantities of paper? Or enlarging a bunch of holes?
Anti-intellectualism has been on the rise for decades and spelling gets worse? I am shocked I tell you!
Also: inb4 the “language evolves!” crowd arrives.
Both are true.
So true. People are likely being fucked up by poor autocorrect algos, as I noticed even mine messing up and turned it off outright, because I blind type like 89wpm on my phone anyway so I’m fine without it. Then they’re defending it like ignorant fools that they are, reasoning backwards and perpetuating anti-intellectualism
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.
This is the real cause. Tech peaked and has since gobe to dogshit monetization, ai-ification and ultimately idiocrification.
Edit: point proven. Autocorrected gone to “gobe”. WTF?
You are now interacting with other nationalities and ethnicities maybe?
Non natives can usually spell better than natives. They learn to spell words and then pronounce them instead of the other way around.
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W3 g01ng b@ck 2 typ31ng 1n l33t?
Y35! HAC4 TH3 PLAN3T!
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.
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!
The distinction between simple past and past participle is disappearing in English more generally. I’m curious whether it will be considered quaint to distinguish them before I’m dead.
I’m always perplexed when I see porn videos with titles that use the continuous present rather than the simple present. One would have thought that the simple present would be the basic stuff for English as a second language, rather than the much less useful continuous present.
I speak a couple of languages in which there is no continuous present, but rather they use phrases such as “I sit and study Swedish” to mean “I’m studying Swedish (as in right now, that’s the task I’m doing)” or “I am in the process of reading a book”. They don’t change the form of the verb to highlight this continuous aspect, so perhaps they aren’t used to it.
Add to that that the continuous aspect in English is surprisingly complicated and arbitrary. If you try to nail down rules for how and when to use it, you might struggle. 😉 Folks struggling to use it correctly might be overcorrecting or merely confused.
There are, I’m sure, other reasons, but this is enough to account for some of what you’re seeing.
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’m also second language lol, I’d never do this, I learned how to write English before I knew how to speak it.
Yeah counterintuitively there are a lot of people who learn English as a 2nd language who have better grammar than native speakers because they actually learn the rules.
Don’t forget the internet is global. People for whom English is a second language are much more common than they once were.
Yes yes you and many others have pointed this dumb take out already. I’m also a second language English speaker, and no one in my family even speaks English or ever has, and I’d never make a mistake like this.
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I would not be surprised if autocorrect was a major culprit along with phone keyboards. You can type something correctly and have autocorrect make it wrong. It’s also super easy to get the wrong letter if you have normal sized hands and are typing on a phone keyboard. I have turned autocorrect completely off and am significantly less error prone as a result.
I frequently decide against correcting an error if I think my intention is clear, and I am in a hurry. I don’t really care what strangers on the internet think of my editing skills.
I hate this. For instance, using u instead of you, autocorrect often turns it to I. It also will fucking “correct” your to you’re when you typed your on purpose. I’m ready to just turn it off. It fucks up my posts, texts, emails all the time. I don’t have this issue on my laptop.
I think you mean it will ducking correct…
I turned mine off completely because it has bo comprehension of when an apostrophe is appropriate in front of the letter s. Forever making words possessive that were intended to be plural. Apostrophes do not mean “look out, here comes an s.”
Thi’s i’s new’s to me. Can you give example’s of when its appropriate to use apostrophe’s?
originally read the title as “people’s spending” so I uh… I guess we should add reading comprehension to the list of things people (me) are bad at
imo some of the drivers for today’s terrible grammar and spelling stem from a “rush to reply” e.g. people commenting “frist!”
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 make a ton of stupid spelling mistakes just because of typing on mobile 99% of the time. For some reason I CONSTANTLY miss the keys I’m looking for, or manage to press them in the wrong order somehow; swapping Ns with Ms, T with Y, R>T, B>N, inserting spaces too early, doubling up characters.
If i nevsr look up and jus tkeep typing, I end of with a garbled mess just liek this sentence is.
This can get much worse if I use the next word suggestions. I’ll spot the suggestion I want, but continue to press the next letter; this changes what’s being suggested, or just moves it to a different position (centered vs the two options to the side) but I still press where I first saw it which is now a totally different suggestion…
Lots and lots and lots of proof-reading. And I STILL fuck it up.
Yeah it’s so dumb, like we have amazing technology, yet the software is fucking terrible.
For example with most keyboard you can have a heat map of where you hit each button. So you can clearly see where the buttons should most comfortable be. However I’ve never seen any keyboard that could ever make use of that data to morph the shape of the buttons to my patterns. It seems so obvious, otherwise why collect that data?
Instead we keep making the same shitty keyboard over and over again. And big companies monitor all our keypresses because number must go up. And put dumb ass AI powered autocorrect that are trained on all data ever instead of my personal data. I swear that thing “corrects” the right word into the wrong word more often than the other way around.
Somehow touchscreens and keyboard have also gotten worse. I remember my old IPhone 4 I could type so fast without errors. And that screen was fucking tiny. Maybe I’m just too old but modern phones make my hands hurt and I still have errors all the damn time.
Who THE FUCK cares?
