Something that annoys me!

I find textspeak really difficult to read, too. We spell out words, even our 14-year-old who sometimes gets teased from her friends for doing so. I rarely use punctuation, though, or upper case letters when texting (unless they are added automatically), it's too laborious; plus how difficult is it to figure out "are you on the 56 bus yet" or "could you pick up some bananas"?

Sometimes I get tired of pecking at the letters and will use "u" or "ur" or "ikr" to shortcut, but usually by then, I phone the person to finish the conversation.

I can't stand the 'text speakers' it grinds my gears I know I miss spell sometimes but that's because I actually don't know how to spell it I did not do good in school maybe because the teachers was mean any who I try my best on spelling correctly and that is funny how you got them to correctly spell that word.

I understand why people do it on the phone, I absolutely cannot type on that little keyboard, my fingers are too fat and I haven't gotten the hang of using my thumbs either.  On my old phone it just had the number keypad and I could do fine with that.  I typed everything out too, even if I had to use multiple messages.  I don't text much anymore anyway.

catspaw66 said:

I once e-mailed one of the local stations to complain about the terrible spelling and grammar that they used on the news.  I was basically told that the proofreader had a college degree in Journalism and to mind my own business.

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Really!  "Local schools will offer low calorie snakes to students."   That was on NECN New England area.

binkyhoo said:

Really!  "Local schools will offer low calorie snakes to students."   That was on NECN New England area.

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I've heard roasted snake IS low calorie and quite tasty, but cannot see a school going through all that prep.......

jcat said:

Text speak bothers me, too. It makes sense to use it when sending a text message with a character limit, but not when you have enough room for full sentences, punctuation and paragraphs. Don't people who use it on boards realize that their posts seem so inconsequential because of the abbreviations that people tend to skim over or ignore them?

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Agree. Just to add, I shy away from long posts that have no paragraph breaks.  I find them unreadable like one 500 word sentence.

I am guilty of poor spelling.  I admit there are times when I dont want to take the time to look it up.  I do get tired of the delete and backspace button.

My 12th grade English teacher told us that students were handing in essays with the "text chat" in them. She also believed it was ruining kids abilities to type and spell properly when necessary. For whatever reason, her saying that stuck with me and now I always do my best to type and spell properly. Of course, I do make typos and sometimes I misplace commas and whatnot but I do try my best. 
When I watch YouTube videos and read the comment section, sometimes I swear my IQ drops just trying to understand what people are saying. Things like "yea boii,,dat gurl desrvd dat,,,! haterz gon hate Lolz,,,!" Or something to that effect...
I can understand some of it when it comes to texting if you're in a hurry or because the keys are small and awkward but in general, there is no need. I agree with the teacher I had though. It is destroying the youths spelling abilities. Its sort of scares me how many younger people I talk to that can't spell basic words. Not even just typos, they literally cannot spell. 

ETA: Not trying to be offensive to people who have trouble spelling in general! Sorry. I am referring to younger people who can't spell because of the constant use of slang and text speak.

binkyhoo said:

Agree. Just to add, I shy away from long posts that have no paragraph breaks.  I find them unreadable like one 500 word sentence.

I am guilty of poor spelling.  I admit there are times when I dont want to take the time to look it up.  I do get tired of the delete and backspace button.

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I believe I am a good speller, but I still use the spellcheck button on the toolbar.  On my computer, the reply pane underlines in red any mistakes I have made in spelling.  Is the site software set up to do this or do I have something turned on in Firefox?

(Edit)  I do have check spelling on in the Firefox options.

Aaaaaah, spell check. Not always a good thing. This is from years ago but still applies: http://www.greaterthings.com/Humor/Spelling_Chequer.htm

FWIW, the standard Windows spell check does NOT like Canadian spelling and insists that humour, neighbour, labour, etc are wrong.

Most of the forums and chatrooms I frequent have actually banned the use of "chatspeak" (eg. "ur" instead of "you're") because they all hate it so much.

They're actually pretty understanding if someone just is young or has trouble spelling (especially since it's a gaming community that tends to attract a lot of younger players, and folks for whom English isn't their first language), but it's still considered poor form when someone ditches punctuation or writes in chatspeak because they don't feel like putting in the extra effort. It just means everyone else has to pick up the slack to figure out what on earth they're saying. :\

I do try to use spellcheck when it's available... but I still also check my writing myself, and I never use autocorrect. I've learned my lesson on that long ago! All of the worst errors I've seen have come from somebody's autocorrect substituting the wrong word for a typo. Standard software just isn't at the point yet where it can determine correct word usage with the same kind of intelligence that a human being can. There's actually a pretty funny story about this here, though fortunately the ones I see on the 'net are rarely so embarrassing.

Ibiscribe said:

Most of the forums and chatrooms I frequent have actually banned the use of "chatspeak" (eg. "ur" instead of "you're") because they all hate it so much.

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That would be a good idea, and would stop me from being annoyed almost constantly  . The message boards I am on don't have these rules per se, but people with particularly atrocious grammar and spelling get made fun of. A lot. It seems that no matter what conversation or argument is going on, yelling at and berating someone who refuses to spell a single word correctly (it's amazing how easy it is to tell the difference between someone who genuinely doesn't have a good grasp on English and someone who absolutely refuses to spell words correctly because they're lazy) will always take top billing.

I never use autocorrect.  I just leave it on to catch typing errors.  I have arthritis and sometimes my fingers don't go where I want them to go.

binkyhoo said:

catspaw66 said:

I once e-mailed one of the local stations to complain about the terrible spelling and grammar that they used on the news.  I was basically told that the proofreader had a college degree in Journalism and to mind my own business.

Click to expand...

Really!  "Local schools will offer low calorie snakes to students."   That was on NECN New England area.

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They have the WORST people doing that ticker. There are always mistakes!

FWIW, the standard Windows spell check does NOT like Canadian spelling and insists that humour, neighbour, labour, etc are wrong.

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Yes, same with Australian spelling.  Even if you change the default on things, it always seems to revert to American spelling.  And 'z' everywhere where we use 's'.

 Just to add, I shy away from long posts that have no paragraph breaks.  I find them unreadable like one 500 word sentence.

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     Absolutely!  I used to work in graphics and typography and there was a set 'line length to font size'.  That just doesn't happen in this day of wide-screens as the lines just go on and on and become technically almost unreadable when there is a large block of it.  It is not at all surprising that anyone is put off by long posts with no breaks.. I try to put in a break every couple of lines... four lines maximum.

Another interesting thing is that we always used to use serifed type for blocks of text as the serifs tend to draw the eye across the writing.  Now it's more often sans serif (like this one).

And leading (space between the lines) with long line lengths is way out of proportion.. very cramped.

AbbysMom said:

They have the WORST people doing that ticker. There are always mistakes!

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Yes! Here is one more that I remember that blew my mind. "Soldier was killed after exposing self". What?  It went on to say, "to gun fire".  

May I make a comment about a bit of American grammar? It seems to be the norm over there: the use of 'off of'. 

eg: 'he fell off of a cliff.' 

I just don't get how that even came about.  Couldn't he just fall off a cliff? 

Mani said:

May I make a comment about a bit of American grammar? It seems to be the norm over there: the use of 'off of'. 

eg: 'he fell off of a cliff.' 

I just don't get how that even came about.  Couldn't he just fall off a cliff? 

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I think it's just that most people forget little rules like that, because the correct grammar, even in America, is "off."

I might of used "off of" my self.  He jumped off of the bridge.  Yup.  Well, "learn something new every day."  My grandmother said that.

How about the use of, allso,also and all so?  I have had a teacher who said "all so, its two words."   And I have also seen the spelling as also. And never start a sentance with the word 'and'.  Hey, I try. 

Ya, OK, I checked. Its spelt sentence.    Is spelt a word? 

I looked up spelt. I got a whole essay on spelt, spilled and spelled. I try but I won't go that far.  Will it ever end?
 

binkyhoo said:

I might of used "off of" my self.  He jumped off of the bridge.  Yup.  Well, "learn something new every day."  My grandmother said that.

How about the use of, allso,also and all so?  I have had a teacher who said "all so, its two words."   And I have also seen the spelling as also. And never start a sentance with the word 'and'.  Hey, I try. 

Ya, OK, I checked. Its spelt sentence.

   Is spelt a word? 

I looked up spelt. I got a whole essay on spelt, spilled and spelled. I try but I won't go that far.
 

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Spelt, learnt, burnt etc are words but are mostly used by those of us who learnt the Queen's English rather than American English; also, googling spelt will get articles on a cereal grain called spelt.

Also is the only one of the three that is a real word and means in addition. All so are two words but I cannot think how one would use them together without using a semi-colon or at the very least a comma between them. If I recall, All-So was a glue we used to repair swather canvas and canvas tarps to keep them water resistant; was also pretty good for fixing canvas barn coats and coveralls.

I think that that also, all so, all-so confusion might stem from the word "alright." My English teacher in high school explained to us that it can be "all right" or "alright," and everyone in my class started asking if that was true for all words that started with al. I would assume that the also thing stemmed from that, because people confused it and though all words that started in al could be split off into "all ___"