Picky in Print

Friday, April 29, 2005

Mood: mildly annoyed / picky
Music: 80's music channel on DirecTV

I've been surfing Blog Explosion this evening. I wanted to see what everybody's been up to lately, since I've not been blogging for a while. It was nice to catch up with several I used to regularly read, and find new blogs to add to the regular rounds. The only downside was the filthy language.

Now, I don't mean this in the ordinary sense. I mean the rampant misspelling of the word 'lose' as L-O-O-S-E.

Please tell me that schools haven't disintegrated so far as to fail to teach basic spelling and word usage to an entire generation! I'd love to believe that it's just a typo, but I've seen it far too often for it to be unintentional.

Oh, and another one that gets me is the abuse of the apostrophe. It's everywhere! I've seen restaurant menus that had "pizza's" and produce stands with huge signs declaring they had "strawberry's" (strawberry's what, I always wonder). It's just not that difficult to pluralize words, folks! I mean, whatever happened to "change the y to i and add es"?

Maybe I'm just a spelling snob, but after seeing about a dozen misspellings, I start tuning out whatever I'm reading and mentally writing the author off as ignorant. Now, I know there is an article floating around that has a paragraph entirely misspelled, but argues that if the first and last letters are right, the brain will fill in the proper word. But that doesn't make spelling irrelevant in my book. After all, I'm sure we could all communicate in grunts and Charades gestures, but, obviously, we (most of us) use language to intelligently, precisely and efficiently convey thoughts and ideas.

I think we need to continue to hold ourselves and our children to a higher standard.

That being said, I'm going to climb down off my soapbox now. Anybody else want it? It's still warm....

3 comments:

Dawn said...

I wrote an entire post on the disintegration of grammar (and terrible design) on blogs. You'll appreciate it. :-)

Sapphire Soul said...

Thanks, ZiPpo, for the feedback on the mood/music thing. I wasn't sure about it at first, but I guess it does give insight into the tone of the posts.

Dawn, I read your linked post - I LOVE IT!!! Well said!

Anonymous said...

I'm guilty only too often of missing many of my own mistakes. :( I’m not proud of it. Sometimes it is plain laziness, in a rush or even ignorance. They are not good excuses but it is the truth.

I agree to a point. However, I think a lot of good communications still take place in many of these corners where the language rules are not presented well. I think I would miss out on a lot. There are many different cultures and even people doing it purposely around the blogosphere. There are times it may be a person that doesn’t even really speak the English language and they are writing it in English as a second or third language. There are so many cultural and educational differences in this country alone let alone the entire world.

There are many very smart and experienced individuals that can’t read, spell, write or use quality language skills. I know the last sentence might sound silly but I really feel there are people like this that we can gain so much from them. Maybe, just maybe and sometimes we may tend to judge others a bit harshly via these skill sets.

I guess I look past this many times, because I’m trying to figure out the content over the building blocks. However, the more time and precision taking with the prose can make it easier to read and more comprehensible. You have a great point and discipline to edit my own work is probably a key element that should be pursued and would improve my communications. Overall, I agree with you but I think we can miss out on some wonderful communications when the entire content gets ignored because of poor presentation skills.


Then English is a living language..

Visiting via the Showcase Carnival...

Very nice blog; keep up the great work....

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