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?
Increased reliance on touch screen devices with dodgy autocorrect probably accounts for a good chunk of it.
I know it is not uncommon for me to have to go back and edit something I wrote from my phone after I submit it because I didn’t see the autocorrect mistake before hitting send.
My older friend and i were talking about this a about 6 months ago. We both are convinced auto correct functions are getting worse. I suspect AI injection into the function somehow, but tin foil hat me also thinks it’s strategy to force more people to use microphone. Seems way more valuable to data miners
For me auto correct has a BIG problem when I miss a dubbel consonant. It will start suggesting words that doesn’t have a single letter in common with what I’m trying to spell, it will suggest completely wrong words and it will even suggest nonsensical words that doesn’t exist. Everything except the exact word I have spelt, but with two s instead of one.
Like yesterday I was trying to spell I believe it was “Necessary” but I had spelt “nesesary” and it was like did you mean “Acceptances” “approval” “appel” “sope” “opposition” “operation” “passport” like that isn’t even close to what I’m am trying to type.
So I can completely believe auto correct have gotten worse and AI dose seem like a likely suspect.
Especially the times when I completely don’t know what I am trying to spell but it gets that “Trioqulationitasitq” is supposed to be “tribulation”
I don’t know how in the world it can do that but think nesesary is supposed to be approval.
Oooh good tip, ill have to start paying attention to that
I think you’re onto something there.
Whats that futurama meme? I dont know if i should be happy that if im correct or angry that im not wrong?
Sounds perfectly cromulent to me.
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.
It’s not just spelling, even online people don’t even bother using grammar. They literally stuff 4 different sentences in one line without using commas or periods. It’s maddening, honestly.
I absolutely loathe posts that just say something like “This dog.”
This dog WHAT, bozo.
This dog murdered my family okay it is a really bad dog and it’s evil and bad but also really cute so idk if I can hold a grudge against it but what it can hold against me is the gun that it has pressed to my temple because it has forbidden me from using any punctuation in this run-on paragraph
I’m burnt out man. I just dont have the energy or the careth to be accurate or even care about a small thing.
carrot*
spoiler
/s
No, he just doesn’t carrot all.
Worse: it’s common for the younger generation to reduce everything to three-letter, monosyllabic slang. “Mid” “on god” “no cap” there’s an intellectual laziness that’s trendy and it’s getting worse with time.
Bro didn’t live during sms era.
Are you sure?
During the big wave of Among Us, it was also interesting to see “sus” become a popular term, probably because people don’t know how to spell “suspisus”.
I think it’s more that there’s limited time to talk in the meetings.
Oh
Most of the people you interact with online aren’t native English speakers.
I get the feeling it’s the native speakers who are the worst offenders. The ones using English as a second language at the very least made an effort to learn the language.
EDIT: deleted by thought police mob.
Lmao.
What an awful individual.
Not to mention I wrote my comment before anyone else.
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.
I no phone gudz mane.
No, but really typing on a glass slab sucks. The software sucks ass too and seemingly no OEM is interested in improving it or trying something new.
Android’s spellchecker sucks at handling 2 languages at once so I gotta turn it off and rely on the keyboard’s auto correct.
Both FUTO and Heliboard insist on not correcting obvious misspellings or change correct words to nonexistent ones.I’m convinced we’ve gotten the maximum we can out of the touchscreen QWERTY format. EIther we get a new Blackberry KeyOne style device or we get some stenography-like software innovation that converts vibes to words, I dunno.
I am pretty sure android is getting worse at correcting input and also changes words after the fact as you type, coupled with phones are awful to type on, results in this fucking mess we get now days.
Big tech realised that touch screen keyboards are cheaper to manufacture (develop) than physical keyboards and persuaded everyone that touch screen keyboards are better. Absolutely not. Screw touch screen keyboards.
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
my phone corrects “the” to “Tue”. Thanks phone, exactly what I was going for apparently
Mine autocorrects “the” to “ther” sometimes. Not even a damn word.
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
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.
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?
I blame these f’ing phone keyboards and autocorrect. I can’t see what I am touching, I can’t feel it, there’s no feedback, and I have to look up while I type. Whoever came up with approach deserves… A bad case of indigestion.
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.
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
It’s been awful for a while.
All the too/to/two or their/they’re/there kind of wreckage along with stuff like “for all intensive purposes”, “flee market”, or “diffuse the situation”.
There’s tons of writing like that everywhere. Wouldn’t be so bad if people learned when corrected, but I think most can’t be bothered.
My take is that people don’t read anymore along with probably an unhealthy dose of laziness and “gotta write all messed up to act cool” to boot.
Reading well-written books of any sort will help the mind fix how words go together and how they’re spelled. But today everyone reads everyone else’s shitty grammar, spelling, and whatever massacre of stylistic choices were made to stand out and look cool in the comment section of the youtube videos or tiktoks they just watched. That’s probably the extent of the reading they do.
