Hurray for the Irish tolerance of functional illiteracy!

Mr.Wemmick

Murrisk wrote: »

Perhaps, but it's something I've noted long before smartphones gained popularity. Maybe smartphones are contributing to the rise in the incidence of it but it was always been there. A few of people in my circle who I consider really intelligent have expressed surprise when someone explained 'its' and 'it's' to them. It does seem to be a genuine blind spot for a lot of people. I remember learning about it primary school and I remember my teacher having to spend a long time explaining it to the class because it seems to be a tough one for children - and adults apparently - to get their heads around. Also, whenever my smartphone "corrects" to 'it's', I change it back. Autocorrect isn't to blame for everything! Nothing stopping people from changing the "correction"!

Yes, but not everyone goes back to correct, not having the time to do so (I know I don't).. this is the reason why we have the very funny autocorrects doing the rounds on the internet.

One obvious difficulty with its and it's, is down to the confusion over possession. We apostrophe the 's if an object belongs to someone: Tom's jumper, Sarah's phone, etc., and the apostrophe changes position to show plural or singular.

It is easy to confuse the possessive rule with its, as in the boat and its contents belong to John rather than the boat's contents or John's boat. The car had driven its last journey.. the car and its windows were sparkling clean. Ownership in a sentence with its might take a second read and isn't written/used very often I find.

Everyone gets the contraction rule as it is an easy one to remember.. 'tis the possessive rule that gets the auld brain in an knot

Widdershins

Wanderer78 wrote: »

What do you mean by homonyms?

They're the ones the other poster mentioned, but the reason I mentioned them was a different poster mentioned colleagues who confuse ''its'' and ''it's''. They're homonyms, too.

Bredabe

Widdershins wrote: »

They're the ones the other poster mentioned, but the reason I mentioned them was a different poster mentioned colleagues who confuse ''its'' and ''it's''. They're homonyms, too.

This cause a biggg row in my job in the week, I wrote King's Cross, my direct super said it was Kings' Cross, you can guess the rest, sooooooooo, the silly Irish girl was correct? was I?

B0jangles

Widdershins wrote: »

Sometimes certain words look extremely weird to me, out of context, and I'd be there staring at them wondering why I'd never noticed how weird the spelling is.

There's a related weird little psychological thing that happens when you read/hear the same word too many times in a short period; it's official name is sematic satiation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation

Chuchote

Bredabe wrote: »

This cause a biggg row in my job in the week, I wrote King's Cross, my direct super said it was Kings' Cross, you can guess the rest, sooooooooo, the silly Irish girl was correct? was I?

Yup

B0jangles wrote: »

There's a related weird little psychological thing that happens when you read/hear the same word too many times in a short period; it's official name is sematic satiation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation

Try saying any word over and over for two minutes - it will completely lose its meaning meaning meaning meaning meaning meaning like when you stare in the mirror for a long time and a stranger starts staring creepily back at you.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

Graces7

alchemist33 wrote: »

I know you're joking here, but I do think the almost-universal "could of, should of, would of" is a terrible indictment of the teaching of English in our schools. Shouldn't this have been weeded out at an early stage?

It is the local phonetic dialect.ie they write as they speak. Literacy education went through a phase of teaching writing by sound.

Trying to increase fluency. Not "inhibit" by frequent correction

Failing to realise that it would be very very hard to change to proper usage later .

I never fell for that line when i was teaching. Had my own simple methods that worked well.

Graces7

A Tyrant Named Miltiades! wrote: »

Grammar fascism is intellectualism for the small mind. It's the cognitive veraion of small-man syndrome.

Imagine being the sort of nasty little autocrat who cares about perfectly decipherable, minor spelling mistakes.

My consultant repeatedly misspells my street address on my prescription, and puts the apostrophe in the wrong place. Only the most insecure and intellectually unremarkable of individuals would hold it against him.

A gifted man is rarely born with the mind of a secretary.

But a truly gifted man will seek to ensure he is presenting his work well; take pride in it.
And no one is holding errors AGAINST folk. I certainly do not but feel it is just good manners and also self respect at a basic level.

Sloppy spelling betokens a sloppy attitude to other things. You would dress carefully for an interview? This is the same..

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

Graces7 wrote: »

But a truly gifted man will seek to ensure he is presenting his work well; take pride in it.
And no one is holding errors AGAINST folk. I certainly do not but feel it is just good manners and also self respect at a basic level.

Sloppy spelling betokens a sloppy attitude to other things. You would dress carefully for an interview? This is the same..

Here is all the usual contradiction. Do we consider poor spelling sloppy and, if you admit to it or not, judge people on it, or do we accept that some people have problems with spelling? Considering something to not be good manners or self respectful is judging people.

Princess Consuela Bananahammock

Bredabe wrote: »

This cause a biggg row in my job in the week, I wrote King's Cross, my direct super said it was Kings' Cross, you can guess the rest, sooooooooo, the silly Irish girl was correct? was I?

King's Cross - the cross belonging to a king
Kings' Cross - the cross belonging to a group of kings.

To the best of my knowledge, England has only ever had one king at a time, so I'm guessing it's the first.

One eyed Jack

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

Permabear I figured you'd get a chuckle out of this one. Reviewer lamenting the dumbing down of Bill Nye's new show on Netflix, when he drops a clanger -

Bill Nye's New Netflix Show Is A Little Awkward, But Very Necessary

Nye and his team of correspondents do an admirable job of trying to explain important topics to a broad audience, but sometimes, it all feels too dumbed down and gimmicked up — like they're so afraid of being complicated and boring, that they've overcompensated. Combined with the show's low-fi and low-budget approach, it leads to some weird moments, like when he has people through little balls at him as he wears a sticky lab coat in an effort to explain how vaccines work in society.

Then again, you wouldn't have thought that Nye would be explaining vaccines and urging people to have their kids get their goddamn polio and measles shots 20 years after he first went off the air. We're in a sad state of affairs, with anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers having a disproportionate impact on our public policy and social conversation, and so instead of delving deep into the cutting edge of science, he's got to focus on saving Americans from their dumbest neighbors.

...

Bill Nye probably won't save the world alone, and honestly, we may be hopeless. But he's got an engaging enough show for parents to watch with their kids, and if they both learn something about science, that's a start.

Saving Americans from their dumbest neighbours indeed...

Samaris

B0jangles wrote: »

There's a related weird little psychological thing that happens when you read/hear the same word too many times in a short period; it's official name is sematic satiation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation

Hah, there's a term for it then! Pretty much when you have a moment of "This [word] has lost all meaning to me"?

I was far better at English before I started typing so much. I don't know if it was just because I was very advanced at English for my age for the most part growing up, but I've caught up now, or if I've actually deteriorated through typing, maybe because each letter has to be hit separately, rather than joined flow of letters. I also have a lot more trouble with words with an "a" in them rather than "e" and vice versa (I invariably have to go correct "seperetely/separetely" to "separately" or words that end "en" and "an" cause confusion.

Also, and I do put this down to the internet, but I tend to write forum posts or skype more like conversation than "formal", so I stick commas into my run-on sentences where I'd naturally pause, but it's incorrect in terms of proper grammar (not sure which came first, but I speak pretty much exactly how I write). The internet way of writing is a lot more casual and conversational, so maybe that affects more than me.

And I don't know if this is just down to SO MUCH NEWS TO BE WRITTEN NOW but online newspaper articles can have some absolutely crimes against written English by people who nominally know better. Missing words, missing letters, convoluted sentences, it's like half these articles don't get proof-read. And that's even in the broadsheets. They even fall down on its/it's although the bastion of there/their/they're I've not seen smashed yet.

Chuchote

A few years ago every article in the broadsheets was proofead and checked for libel, and awkward or wrong parts rewritten during the editing process; then the page was proofread by another sub-editor, then the page was proofread by three senior sub-editors; then it was read and passed by the section editor, and then by the newspaper's editor.

Now… I don't know. Apparently they take a handful of type and throw it at a page and hope it lands right.

Samaris

Chuchote wrote: »

A few years ago every article in the broadsheets was proofead and checked for libel, and awkward or wrong parts rewritten during the editing process; then the page was proofread by another sub-editor, then the page was proofread by three senior sub-editors; then it was read and passed by the section editor, and then by the newspaper's editor.

Now… I don't know. Apparently they take a handful of type and throw it at a page and hope it lands right.

I figure it's because of the 24-hour news cycle. They have to churn out articles and the quality goes down because it can't require too much time to prepare or read over.


As a side thing, try saying "What would you with the King" with various different bits of punctuation.

"What? Would you! With the -King-?"

Not to mention the time a comma cost a million Canadian dollars (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/business/worldbusiness/25comma.html) and the time a comma lost a war (Don't have a citation and I can only remember that it was regarding someone sending for help, but the comma made it look like it was a "sure, this might happen at some point and we'll need help if it does happen, k?" rather than a "HELP!".

Chuchote

Samaris wrote: »

I figure it's because of the 24-hour news cycle.

Not that, anyway. There used to be three editions of the papers in the 1980s, and at the turn of the 19/20 century even more. (By the same token, there were several postal deliveries per day then (19/20).)

Roger Casement is said to have been "hanged upon a comma" - his lawyer, Sergeant Sullivan, was arguing that a comma in an Act changed its meaning and Casement was therefore not guilty of conspiring against Britain. He might better have been referred to as hanged upon an illness: the famous advocate Sullivan collapsed with nervous exhaustion and an assistant finished the case, which finished poor Casement.

https://ipdraughts.wordpress.com/2013/10/14/hanged-on-a-comma-drafting-can-be-a-matter-of-life-and-death/

(Less seriously, there's the famous example of why capitalisation is important: "I helped my uncle Jack off his horse", vs "I helped my uncle jack off his horse".)

Samaris

Hm, fair point on the 24-hour news cycle. Maybe it's something to do with the speed at which it gets bunged up on the internet and the relative ease of correction once it's there if needs be? With hard-copy papers that required typesetting etcetera, it was just about impossible to correct anything without issuing a new paper with a correction printed in it.

I dunno, I do think that there's something more than just plain old illiteracy at work with the newspaper issues, but I admit I'm unsure exactly what.