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?
Spelling? I’m not worried about spelling when it’s been acceptable to murder grammar in public for 20 years.
“Extream” is an archaic spelling found in dictionaries, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this was just autocorrect/swyping. It also seems like 90% of the usages come from HumanPenguin or 1984.
I feel like auto correct and voice to text aren’t as good as they used to be. AI, laziness, I’m more of an idiot not sure who to blame.
Fuck the people who get simple words wrong. Our language is degrading as tikok and video shorts are on the rise and attention spans decline.
Soon enough people won’t have the attention span to even write anymore.
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.
My mobile spelling has gotten to be garbage because my phone keyboard autocorrects Sometimes and I’ve gotten lazy about Swype/deleting mid-word mistakes. My pen/paper and also physical keyboard spelling remains persnickety
See, I legitimately can’t even tell if you’re trolling or not.
I turned off autocorrect because it was changing valid words into other words. Having an obvious typo is preferable to changing the meaning completely, which happened enough times for me to notice.
my phone corrects “the” to “Tue”. Thanks phone, exactly what I was going for apparently
My phones autocorrect has been garbage recently. I feel like a few years ago, it was much better at predicting what I meant to type, and I could easily edit on mobile using the suggested corrections. But now it is worse. Even with words or names I use all the time.
Ditto. My older phone (Lineage 17) doesn’t have this problem, compared to my current (Lineage 20)
How long have you had it? it took my current keyboard 3ish months to be as good as gboard which I had been using for years.
I dont have the learn as you type features on, I just use the stock keyboard with stock dictionary
Mine autocorrects “the” to “ther” sometimes. Not even a damn word.
I think this is finally being corrected, but for decades kids have been taught “whole word reading” rather than phonics. The basic idea is that instead of learning how to sound out words, they should look at the first letter and guess what they think the word might be based on context/pictures. The proponents of this method claim kids will memorize words as “whole words” and eventually be able to read.
So, they can’t actually read. But they know how to look like they can read.
When you can’t read it’s not enjoyable, so you read less. When you read less you come across fewer words, which you don’t really know how to decode anyway because you were never taught.
Anyway these kids are now adults, and even the ones who are smart still struggle with spelling and reading.
Check out the podcast Sold a Story, really interesting investigation on this topic.
This made me look up “whole word reading”, and it just made me irrationally angry. To be fair, English isn’t my native language and I don’t have a recollection of learning how to read, but “whole word learning” sounds insane. But like… Why would you do that if you are using an alphabet?
Phonics is dogshit and it’s being phased out in favour of whole word reading here.
You should not learn spelling by “sounding out” much of anything, you should learn it through reading text and remembering how words are spelt.
At average apparent text sizes, you only see ~4 letters clearly at a time, so it’s often enough that you can’t read a whole word at once. From there, there’s so many prefixes, suffixes, conjugations, compounds, and portmanteaus that it doesn’t make sense to just try to memorize the dictionary. What happens when you’re reading a flamboyant author that has tons of theasaraus usage and you come across words you’ve never heard in your life? You use context as best you can, but if there’s familiar roots in the word, you have a better chance of understanding it.
Also
spelt
That is a grain spelled “spelt”
You can memorize the patterns of each word and eventually you just understand language. Is that not how it’s meant to work?
You might want to look at the latest research. Its not favorable after decades of data from “whole word” reading techniques education.
you should learn it through reading text and remembering how words are spelled.
Thats the concept of “whole word”, yes, but in practice it severely limits vocabulary and comprehension apparently. That real world data tells the tale.
I’ll have a look, but idk I was taught whole word in two languages and I can write a lot better than I can speak in at least 1.3 of them.
Did you downvote me because I pointed out the latest research doesn’t agree with your position?
I didn’t downvote you at all
My apologies. The downvote was on my post in under 15 seconds after I posted it. I had assumed the only one that would see it would be the person alerted to it. I guess Lemmy is growing up there are downvoters waiting to pounce instantly! We’re graduating to the big leagues now!
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.
Cashiers here have started saying “have a good rest of your day” instead of “have a good afternoon” or whatever.
It’s excruciating. It’s only emerged in the last few years.
I know language evolves and all but not like this.
I think that it’s mostly just Lemmy being less dominated by native English speakers. Many of those mistakes that seem baffling “make sense” in some other languages
You’re not crazy. Nobody wants their grammar correcting; they lash out and call people who do that “grammar nazis” instead of thanking them for helping them improve. So they get to post whatever they like, and of course as more people see stuff spelt incorrectly they assume that’s correct and use those errors themselves, but intentionally. And of course the dictionary writers realise they are descriptive, not proscriptive, so the argument “the dictionary says…” is voided.
Autocorrect is OK to an extent but it’s not smart enough yet to understand what people are actually saying. So it gets switched off.
Also it is worth mentioning that English is a complex language with many inconsistencies. “extream” is incorrect, but “stream” isn’t, and that “eam/eme” is pronounced the same way. So “extream” is at least understandable. It’s similar to “ect” instead of “etc”, which is commonly mispronounced as “ek-setera” so you can see why people think the C is after the E.
I used to try to help people a lot but just got a whole load of abuse back. These days I only query something if I genuinely can’t grok what they’re trying to say. Or I just ignore it. If the question is so badly garbled that I can’t understand it I just assume they won’t be able to understand may answer, which will probably be quite detailed.
they won’t be able to understand may answer
I assume that “may” is an unintentional mistyping of “my”, right?
I definitely agree. I want to point out errors, but the issue is most people do not want errors to be pointed out and see it as nitpicking at best, or an act of aggression at worst.
Smart Technology has always been about removing our ability to effectively communicate with nuance and assess reality that’s what it’s for. Autocorrect so you can’t spell, google maps so you can’t find your way out of a paper bag without them. People’s lexicons have diminished, substantially since 2007. The quantity and variety of expressions used have dropped off majorly. All this connection with people all over the world and we use it to maintain quasi social relationships with people we hardly care about. It’s a joke.
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
My spelling and grammar are a lot worse when I type on my phone. I also accidentally a word.
I don’t bother with correcting it since I don’t care.
Almost 10 years ago I began to see this trend online and at work where people were misspelling ‘separate’ as ‘seperate’ and I am still irrationally angered by it.
