Petition to strike THAN from the english dictionary.

[EatSmart]

'cos more and more people think they spell better THEN I normally do. I normally let it slide, but it's finally cheesing me off. And more from supposedly English speaking countries than not...

/rant off

Keep in mind that the English language basically walked up to other languages and mugged them for spare vocabulary, grammar etc. Its a vice that it still indulges in from time to time. Dictionaries are determined by how the language is being used in the present. Would someone asking "Where's that to?" make sense to you? Chances are it wouldn't, but if you lived in certain regions of England you'd be met with dumbfounded looks if you asked "what do you mean?".

Heck, I sometimes use a 'their' when i meant 'there' or 'they're' when i'm typing quickly into party chat.

More annoying to see in LFMs where people had the time to review their LFM and edit it. People looking for trapmonkeys but asking for makeup are more annoying IMO.

I'm sure I had a point somewhere in all this.

[pSINNa]

And while we're at it, all players that haven't memorised your logarithmic tables, and rely on those new fandangled 'calculator' mental crutches should all be lined up and shot.

What's the world coming to.

(Just remember when color was spelt colour, honor was spelt honour, when a new base 10 system for measurement was introduced called 'metric', when programming was done with self contained hard switched binary strings manually punched in instead of flexible mnemonic object oriented modules calling apon common libraries and engines full reuseable routines, etc, etc, etc, - dumbing down, give me convenience or give me death, or......)

stop whinging, who cares.

:P :P :P :P

[Demeron]

Remember the internet was developed for military first and foremost...flooding the channels with chatter is a way to blend in their communications to make them almost indistinguishable to help ensure their security.

Was not developed first for the military http://info.cern.ch/

[Azuarc]

I find the people detracting from the OP's message for whatever reasons deplorable.

I don't always use 100% pristine pure perfect grammar, but I do employ something close enough to it that I'm not going to upset anyone who isn't a total grammarian. You could argue I need commas before my series of adjectives in the previous sentence, but most people don't care. There are some things that are acceptable or understandable, end than their our many ohter tings dat r jus not exceptible.

The problem is that people who are lazy about their spelling and grammar have found outlets where they can not only choose not to learn the correct way as their way, but they can even find methods to make their communications even lazier than that. When I find that high school students have an easier time reading something written in text lingo than proper English, there's a problem. (I am a high school teacher, just not for English.) Worse, it seems to me that the longer I have been a part of internet communities, the worse my own grammar has become. I routinely type the wrong 'there,' type 'me' for 'my,' and a whole host of other things without bringing memes into play.

The language is not evolving; it's devolving. Anyone who claims that this is a natural process for languages so that we doth naught be conversing in Ye Auld Englishe is wrong -- or at least, if they are correct about the process being natural, they are not correct about the rapidity with which it is taking place. The issue does not stem from people inventing new "words" and idioms to express themselves, nor is it a matter of people in different dialects doing things different ways. The issue, plain and simple, is that electronic media doesn't care if people do things correctly, and worse still, the people who have to read these errant communications are strong-armed into NOT correcting the mis-users so they never learn. I've seen behavior like this elsewhere, psychologically speaking, and it's basically a matter of "yeah, I know what I'm doing is wrong, but screw you! You're gonna do things my way, or you're gonna get out of my way." Without that grade school teacher looking over their shoulder and marking things up with the authority of the red pen, people create their own brand of justice, and they brand rather fiercely anyone who has the audacity to tell them that they're doing it wrong. I understand being upset about someone telling you that you're wrong in general, but when you actually ARE wrong and know (or should know) darn well that you are, being defensive, indignant, and all ways up and down hostile is completely uncalled for.


To the non-native speakers out there, I think it's safe to say most of the people decrying poor language skills are not looking at you. And yes, we can usually tell you apart from the kids who refuse to learn or use the different versions of their, there and they're. From the people who use accept and except interchangeably. From the users of such words as libery (library), similiar, and definately. From the people who take words they know and cut out letters in an effort to brief or to be cool, often severing readability from their abbreviated variations. (Do people really use S-O-Z to mean sorry? I thought it was just a cool way to say "so.") So please, do not worry. We know who you are most of the time. We're not upset with you because, to be perfectly honest, you normally use English better than most of our own native speakers. We welcome you, but wonder if you can take the hooligans back with you to your own land when you log for the night.

I also have nothing against people who are simply chronically bad spellers, who can't remember which side of a parentheses the comma goes, or who want to abbreviate common internet-friendly phrases that we all recognize. But if you fly in the face of what is considered the correct way to do things, please don't get mad at me when your comments are written so poorly as to be unreadable without first translating your message and I happen to call you out on it. You're making my eyes bleed. I've learned not to be so uptight as to correct every "misteak" someone makes, so if you bother me to the point that I say something, you're way out in left field and need to come join the rest of us back in Communicationland.



Apologies for the TLDR. And please, no need to pick apart the grammatical mistakes I made, a few of which were intentional, (such as starting a sentence with 'and.')

[Nexx]

Wow... You sould come to rural New England then... We put R's in places where there are no R's (Idear) And drop them from where they should be... Ca (car), Ba (bar), nought to raise webster from the grave.....

Ha ha ha! This made my day As I have moved to the New England area from my home of Dallas, Texas...and I couldn't quite understand what they meant by "Ca" lol..

[jmelanie7]

It's not a language problem, it may be a generation problem, cause we have the same issue here in Quebec. Even though i admit French to be much more difficult to WRITE than english, people who speak french as their primary language shouldn't have any issues writing it. They even had to dumb down the language for them, cause they were failing to hard!

Yes, i believe that propper grammar is important, but I think I get over it alot easier on the forums or a video game than in real life.

[GhoulsTouch]

Was not developed first for the military http://info.cern.ch/

That was 1989 and the development of HTML...the internet was in use way before then.

Here is a movie that you could be familiar with that was made in 1983 when the internet started to get more buzz in the mainstream

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/

The development of Hyper text was not the invent of the internet but could very well be the advent.