No Stupid Questions

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.

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.

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.

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.

No, I think you does have point, I've been sawing that, too.

You are now interacting with other nationalities and ethnicities maybe?

Nazi*

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.

wu7 u m34n, m8? 4lw4y5 b33n l1k3 d15. /s

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.

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.

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

I make more spelling mistakes when autocorrect is on than when it's off (and every little update to the os seems to re-enable it 😬) because it constantly wants to change words that were spelled correctly, to a different word that doesn't fit the context.

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

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

There is a few words I cannot spell, and I've just given up on them at this point (definitely, infinitely, critisism ).

Sometimes I type too fast and post a comment with a typo, and a few times the edit fixing it didn't federate.

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.

Lemmy seems to have a pretty high number of non-native English speakers, particularly Germans and other Europeans. I think this leads to people making seemingly simple grammar mistakes while also appearing to know English well.

Plus, American schools have completely gone to shit, so I’m sure that doesn’t help either.

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.

Fuck the people who get simple words wrong. Our language is degrading as tikok and video shorts are on the rise and attention span decline.

Soon enough people won't have the attention span to even write anymore.

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

tze fone keebord iz wery smol

itz werry deefeekult tuu tipe vordz korrektly

I've noticed mine got worse for some reason in the last five years. So many words that I've had no issue spelling I've lost confidence in spelling and need to look it up. Happened around COVID for me, not sure why.

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?

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.

It also seems to be on the rise in online publications. Both spelling errors and synonym/grammar issues have increased significantly over the last year, most significantly in the last 3-4 months.