A plea for netiquette

General
41

Um, i haven’t taken a poll or anything, but i’d guess that it’s laziness.

Mikefule brings up an excellent piece of psychology though. I often have that problem with the ‘is’ and ‘isn’t’ thing, but, if i’m not sure, then i refer back to the rule, over and over again. Eventually, i remember it and no longer make the mistake. It comes down to whether you care that you’re wrong. I, personally, am not a big fan of being wrong, so i make an effort to correct myself when my wrong is brought to my attention.

Really? You’re saying that if you always wrote, “I will neaver ‘learn’ to spell”, and people constantly told you that it is spelt ‘never’ because it is a conjunction of ‘not’ and ‘ever’, being “n’ever” and then ‘never’, you wouldn’t eventually learn the proper spelling? Either i don’t understand your inability, or i just have more faith in you than you do. You seem to spell fine (finely?) to me, and you even understand the difference between ‘then’ and ‘than’, (the former being a sequencing and the latter being a comparison, people). If you had specific, unambiguous rules for all spelling and grammar, and always had these rules available to you, then i’m pretty you could go without making a spelling or grammar mistake (typos excluded) ever again. I think that everyone can ‘learn’ to spell and use proper grammar, if they wanted to. It all comes down to will.

I also think that most people could learn to spell and use proper grammar a lot better than they are currently doing so, without needing to have to refer to literature for rules all of the time. I’m sure that they could memorize the rules pretty well on their own. Of course, there could be the case where learning some new rule makes you forget an old rule, and, therefore, you’re stuck in a never-ending cycle, but other than that, yeah. I think there’s a Homer Simpson quote there somewhere, but i can’t remember what it is.

So, in my view, the way to learn to write properly is to first be notified when you are wrong, and then to have the will to correct yourself. The first step, thankfully, is what people have been doing for others. Thus, my original defence of them. The second step is up to the people whom (‘whom’, right, because it’s part of the predicate?) are making the mistakes. Insulting, still, has no place in this process, though.

42

Re: Re: A plea for netiquette

You’re nasty Klaas :angry:

There I was, typing dont, I figured I’ve been lazy a lot, and it needs a ', and it didnt, how sucky :frowning: Nah Klaas, I love you really, in a manly way that is…

43

Don’t exclude “kerb” from that list.

44

Bah. Spell better, let bad spelling slide, end of story.

45

I think that is true, and is apparently the case on both sides of the pond. Having grown up with it (most of us), we’re well aware that English is a complicated language with vague rules and way too many words.

But…

We’re moving into a place where we communicate by text a lot more than we used to. If you only speak, these problems may not show up as much but if you post here a lot, for example, you might as well use it as an opportunity to try to improve.

There is no “can’t learn to spell.” This is only true if coupled to a known and diagnosed learning disability that will manifest itself in additional ways. “Can’t learn” is what keeps most people from enjoying unicycling. It isn’t that they can’t, but they choose to can’t. They build a wall in front of that possible extension of their life experience.

If you can identify common spelling or grammar errors you make, you can learn to fix them with relatively little effort. I’ve been doing this for years. The English language goes on forever though, so I think it’s kind of a lifelong process. But at least I’ve got my “there’s” figured out. And when not to use an apostrophe. That one always gets me. The bigger the sign, the worse it is when it says “Nacho’s”.

If you write long posts here, you really should give them a look over before walking away. I try to read my posts after I submit them, at which time I often go back and make corrections. Sometimes spelling, and sometimes to improve the communication of what I’m trying to say. If you just toss off a bunch of disjointed words, and your question is almost impossible to understand, I will assume you didn’t really want to know. The same question, written out with the respect of the time of whoever might answer, gets a lot more attention from me.

As we are a forum of “higher standards” than many others, I believe we should take it upon ourselves to try and improve our written language skills as long as we’re at it.

46

Exactly. It’s a moving, changing thing, which means that grammar can never really be prescriptive but only descriptive.

However, I’m with you on all this, John. We should all do our best to make sure our posts are at the very least understandable. Having said that, the poorly spelt, ungrammatical posts have still usually got something to say that will get me deciphering them.

I’ll still buy tomato’s from a stall if they are good and cheap :smiley:

47

Well, it’s one type of learning theory. Other theories would suggest that you praise success rather than pointing out failures.

Vygotski would probably suggest that we learn best by modelling ourselves on the good spellers in the forum and ask for help when we aren’t sure.

And I think there’s one or two dyslexics who might disagree with you there.
Actually, I can spell very well, except I spell phonetically, and the rest of the English world doesn’t. I think I’m right & you’re wrong.

Cathy

48

Surely it is the vague nature of the rules of English that make it easy to make oneself understood, even if the rules aren’t any where near adhered to. “I don’t not know no one what don’t want no nine-inch nails.” We don’t try to work out what the sentence means from analysing all the double negatives, we just know what it means.

I wouldn’t say English has too many words at all - the more the merrier. It would be very boring if everyone used the same words to communicate the same concepts.

English evolved from a primaeval soup of linguistic ingredients from all over the place, as these islands were repeatedly colonised and\or invaded by Germans, Italians, French, Scandinavians etc. Even now it is evolving at an ever increasing rate by it’s dissemination around the world as well as influx of influences from ethnic groups and cultures settling here, particularly former empire countries such as India and W Indies etc. The greater number and more varied the speakers there are of a language, the quicker it will evolve, but the rules are flexible enough to accommodate evolution in many different directions at the same time, yet all those flavours of the language are still English and, accent not withstanding, can be easily understood by speakers of different variants of English - I know that what you mean when you write “tire” may well be the the noun “tyre” rather than the verb to tire. I remember reading a post in another thread about tires/tyres where the correspondant was a Canadian and used both spellings for the noun meaning several times, sometimes even both in the same sentence.

Some linguistic changes are easier to understand than others; e.g.
Opposite of flamable used to be inflamable, but inflamable has switched meaning and the opposite is non-inflamable. :thinking:

A Quantum Leap is a very great increase, yet quantum physics and quantum mechanics are the study of unimaginably small particles and forces. :thinking:

There wasn’t much need for standardised spelling until printing technologies were widely used and enough people could actually read.

Long live the idividual approach to spelling and grammar - it is a part of what makes us individuals. Having said that, don’t say “compared to” when what you really mean is “compared with”. I find myself shouting at the TV when contestants on The Weakest Link say that one of the other players “got several questions wrong” - “No they didn’t, they got several ANSWERS wrong.” but we all know what they meant.

The list could be huge, but I shall kerb my self-indulgent excesses of pedantry.:wink:

Chris

49

what’s netiquette?

50

Well for one, it’s not tying up the message boards and polluting threads with mindless comments just so you can see your name on every thread down the right hand column. That’s childish, not showing proper “net etiquette” or netiquette.

So please child, isn’t it past your bedtime or something?

51

What you are lacking at the moment.

52

You don’t even know my time-zone!

53

Yes, and being a tree, let’s assume I’m too dense to figure it out by finding N. Dakota on a map.

So run along now junior. Don’t keep the tooth fairy waiting.

54

I just put ND so people would like me!

55

Yeah, I’d say your reasoning was flawed on that one.

56

Oh yeah? I see that you only post .14 times a day! pretty panzy