Gilgamesh Tetraglot Senior Member England Joined 6242 days ago 452 posts - 468 votes 14 sounds Speaks: Dutch, English, German, French Studies: Polish
| Message 33 of 47 26 November 2007 at 1:27pm | IP Logged |
leserables wrote:
Sorry, of course you're right about "lose versus loose" Am I little scatterbrained at times. What I did was look instead of listen and just concentrated on the lose [u:z] sound as opposed to the "chose" sound. My mistake.
As for "alot", I don't like that any better than I like nite, rite etc. but if people want to use those spellings, fine by me. I don't want anybody to complain about my colour, behaviour, neighbour either. Or my pronunciation of "tomato" (NOT like potato).
As I said, this is a forum about learning languages, not about correct English spelling. |
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No offence, but that is rather silly.
Yes, this is a forum about languages. English is a language. Many people on this board are learning/wish to improve their English as well. So how is this not a valid discussion?
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owshawng Senior Member United States Joined 6886 days ago 202 posts - 217 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 34 of 47 26 November 2007 at 2:02pm | IP Logged |
I'm the OP for lose vs loose. I forgot to mention in my original post that loose instead of lose was on an investment forum. That's what really bugged me. How can you be a Wall St professional or serious investor and consistently use loose instead of lose? I believe investors who always use loose instead of lose take a big creditability hit. Would you use a lawyer who kept using "well" for "Will" as in Last Will and Testament or always confused divorce with discourse, or a doctor who confused "pill" and "peel"?
Forums are informal, kind of like chatting with a friendly acquaintance so most typos don't bother me. Everyone makes typos, but I think typos depend on the information the poster is discussing. If someone on this board who was studying Spanish kept typing Spinach for Spanish I wouldn't pay much attention to their posts either. Spanis or Spnish are simply fingers moving too fast or too soft and have no impact on the poster's credibility. Spinach on the other hand....
Edited by owshawng on 26 November 2007 at 2:05pm
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Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6894 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map
| Message 35 of 47 27 November 2007 at 4:15am | IP Logged |
I don't mind seeing the occasional slip, on the keyboard or otherwise, and it happens to me too much more often than I'd like.
But I can't help being annoyed at seeing sloppy spelling, and other errors, spreading more and more when it is obvious that the person simply couldn't care less about it. Not caring about your own language is not caring about your culture, your heritage and your identity even.
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Gilgamesh Tetraglot Senior Member England Joined 6242 days ago 452 posts - 468 votes 14 sounds Speaks: Dutch, English, German, French Studies: Polish
| Message 36 of 47 27 November 2007 at 6:47am | IP Logged |
Hencke wrote:
But I can't help being annoyed at seeing sloppy spelling, and other errors, spreading more and more when it is obvious that the person simply couldn't care less about it. Not caring about your own language is not caring about your culture, your heritage and your identity even. |
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Someone had to say it - finally. Thank you very much.
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Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6665 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil
| Message 37 of 47 27 November 2007 at 6:48am | IP Logged |
The most creative "typo" I've ever
seen was in a conference talk:
engredeints (for ingredients)
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Lifted Bilingual Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5540 days ago 14 posts - 14 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish* Studies: German, Polish, Latin, Russian
| Message 38 of 47 06 October 2009 at 9:47pm | IP Logged |
William Camden wrote:
I know of a Scottish nurse who confused the words "spiritual" and "respiratory". So someone with breathing problems had "spiritual difficulties", for example. No doubt someone religious would be "deeply respiratory". |
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Wow. Thank you for posting this. I laughed for quite a long time.
Concerning the topic at hand, it's not so much the errors that bother me per se, but rather the fact that many of the people who commit these errors don't care enough to proofread their statement/work before they submit/post it. I understand mistakes, because I, like most people, am not immune from making them. The difference is that I check my work before I submit it, so that typos, misspelled words and/or incorrectly used words/phrases are kept to a bare minimum.
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administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7376 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes 12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map
| Message 39 of 47 06 October 2009 at 10:07pm | IP Logged |
I'm the one who wrote and enforced the “If you can't spell it, don't write it.” policy for the last 5 years on this forum and definitely don't like such typos. It seems to me that the you're-for-your typo is mostly made by native English speakers. Somehow it doesn't come out naturally for people whose first lesson of English was "I am - You are - he is" and much later were told that "you are" could perhaps possibly also be written "you're". To me it is much like a TV presenter who would cough or pick his nose or have some annoying verbal tick - it is disrespectful for other users, and especially so from native speakers who should know better.
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Woodpecker Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5811 days ago 351 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (Egyptian) Studies: Arabic (classical)
| Message 40 of 47 06 October 2009 at 11:51pm | IP Logged |
It is a near certainty that somewhere in this thread, this has already been brought up, but on the off chance it hasn't...
Am I the only one who finds the OP's apostrophe usage delicious in its irony?
And in the spirit of contributing something, I blame these serious deficiencies in the basic writing skills of many Americans on the idiotic focus on grammar throughout elementary school. Teach kids to read, then have them read as much as possible for the first five years of their education, and such problems will disappear. My home-schooled mind positively shrieks every time it is forced to interpret a lovely "Your friends baseball is over they're."
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