Say a spell.

[reddragdiva]

Something for my Wikipedian readers, particularly this thread, in which redshira nails the nature of Tha Intarwebs.

Comments

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

I worry about the man who corrected his girlfriend's grammar in bed.
...
Um. And now I'm worried whether I've done that myself.

[reddragdiva]

Now, correcting your loved one's spelling in bed ...

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

... suggests that re-enacting The Pillow Book is not the leisure activity for you.

[redshira.livejournal.com]

Heehee. He only did it the once, and we weren't very far along in the proceedings. I was able to mock him mercilessly for a few minutes, laugh it off, carry on with our, ahem, evening's entertainment, then spend the next few months telling everyone about it. :)

[mindspillage.livejournal.com]

Hey, you just need to have the right SO.

At least, mine hasn't run off screaming into the night yet, though maybe that's because he would have to find his pants.

[reddragdiva]

And you can correct each other's grammar in bed!

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

Her post makes me think: why is it that whilst it's a taboo to take the piss out of people who are dyslexic for bad spelling, it's okay to take the piss out of bad spelling otherwise?

I guess the key point about dyslexia is that this is people whose bad spelling isn't due to poor intelligence. But nonetheless, someone can't control their intelligence anymore than having dyslexia - is it more acceptable to take the piss out of people for being stupid if they can't help it? Plus people may spell a specific word wrong due to learning it correctly and never realising, which is likely to be the case with words like "definitely" (my problem was "independent", which I only recently realised didn't have an "a"...) - so that's not a sign of being stupid either, just like dyslexia. Is there some fundamental difference I'm missing, I wonder?

I have much more of a problem with people who insist a word is spelt correctly even after a mistake is pointed out, or people who claim that bad spelling doesn't matter "because language evolves".

(PS, any spelling or grammar mistakes in this post are due to beer.)

[reddragdiva]

In that thread I was actually condemning fuckheadedness, which is orthogonal to intelligence. Inherent reasons are fine; wilful stupidity is another thing.

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, there's no excuse for wilful stupidity. (The link doesn't seem to work for me right now, so I shall check again later to learn about fuckheadedness!)

[jdforrester.livejournal.com]

In the case given, it really was wilful stupidity, sadly - "I know I spell badly, but I just don't care, and won't make an effort to reform so as to ease other people's lives and work better" (except said less lucidly and doubtless with many an error in spelling ;-)).