No Stupid Questions

A majority have always been bad at spelling

Honestly I'm not doing much effort to be correct when writing English. As long as people get more or less my point I do not really care

No you aren’t getting crazy. I stopped double checking my spelling after Trump became president the first time. Clearly most people don’t mind bad spelling so why bother?

You are going crazy. I've been on the internet since like 1992 and have spent many, many years reading forums and playing text-based role playing games, and this is very not new. Spelling has always been awful because the internet isn't a formal medium where that stuff matters to most people. If anything it's probably gotten better since the advent of smart phones with built in auto-correct.

Just imagine you having to fix a thousand pages of this. I feel your pain.

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.

it's the mispeling vyrus

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.

Thats my secret cap, i’ve always had poor spelling

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

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.

Most of the people you interact with online aren't native English speakers.

I'm not native English. It's imperfect English or writing in other language that not many would fully understand.

My online grammar and spelling is like a drunkard has taken over my keyboard. Swiping is awful for accuracy

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 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.

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.

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.

Ableism

You are now interacting with other nationalities and ethnicities maybe?

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.

Nazi*

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.

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

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.