"The Great Typo Hunt": The irresistible allure of bad spelling - Nonfiction

via salon.com

In November of 2007, Jeff Deck encountered a sign that would change his life. He had just returned from his five-year college reunion at Dartmouth College, embarrassed by his lack of accomplishment in life, when, walking near his apartment in Somerville, Mass., he encountered a sign that had already stopped him in his tracks multiple times: "Private Property: No Tresspassing." The extra "s" in the sign had, as he puts it, long been "a needle of irritation" -- but now something had changed: He felt the urgent need to correct it.
In the days that followed, Deck decided to give his life some purpose (at least for a few months) and, several months later, set off on a road trip around the United States in order to document our country's many misspellings. He gave himself the mandate of correcting at least one spelling mistake every single day. Together with a rotating cast of friends, he traveled from the Northeast ("bread puding") to Georgia ("pregnacy test") to Wisconsin ("Milwuake Furniture") while documenting each mistake and each correction on his blog -- a mission that taught him about the breadth of America's language problem and its citizens' strongly divergent attitudes toward the English language.

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Spelling Nazis are us

I am a bit pedantic with spelling. I am not perfect, but I am always jarred by blatently blatantly incorrect spelling.

This gentleman wants to lower the bar. I say no. It is bad enuff with email, chat, gaming and SMS without deliberately accepting spelling variants. That will happen over time. Look at Yanqui English.

Rather than grammarians getting in a huff about "argument" being spelled "arguement" or "opportunity" as "opertunity," why not accept anything that's phonetically (fonetickly anyone?) correct as long as it can be understood?

"Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I've got a better idea," Ken Smith, a criminology lecturer at Bucks New University, wrote in the Times Higher Education Supplement.

"University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell."

To kickstart his proposal, Smith suggested 10 common misspellings that should immediately be accepted into the pantheon of variants, including "ignor," "occured," "thier," "truely," "speach" and "twelth" (it should be "twelfth").

I mean how does atrosious look to you? Atrocious? It does to me, the soon to be spelling snob elitist.

That would annoy me and distract from my ability to read a paper. I think of email and sms need to be spelt spelled correctly. Hannah has spelling lists every week now and I can certainly identify with some of the challenges that kids go through constructing English words in a way that makes sense. Part structure, part pattern, part familiarity, part phonetics. Worth struggling through I think. It is all very well to use spell checker and dictionary.com, but the ability to spell correctly is very useful life skill that is being eroded.

And is it mispell or misspell?

SMS = Sending Messages Suks

Not being much of an SMS type of guy, this is useful.

I find the impact of SMS on written English very jarring. What to say? I am over 40 and a bit of a stickler on spelling and the like. Of course you can use the programme in reverse for those tricky indecipherable cryptic notes that sometimes appear on my phone.

Translation for our more smsavvy viewers as follows.

I fnd d impact of SMS on ritN en vry jarring. w@ 2 sA? Im ovr 40 n a bit of a stickler on sp n d lk. Of corZ u cn uz d prog n reverse 4 doZe tricky indecipherable cryptic notes dat sumtyms appear on my ph

Thanks Beerli