<p>Anyone ever quit worrying about their typos, spelling or grammar when posting on these threads? I hate to type, find myself making mistakes I would never make in longhand and come across some interesting near-words when hitting adjacent keys. Let it be known that here’s one perfectionist who hasn’t figured out whether or not to feel bullied by the language police… I do know that it isn’t worth spending too much time (ie more time than I already waste) looking things up or always correcting every error- save that for the formal paper.</p>
<p>This was a fun thread to read, please don’t get too pendantic (?- doesn’t look right, but it’s too late to look it up) or critical. I thought the postings were to be casual, quick and conversational, not formal. </p>
<p>My pet peeves include ain’t, me and him, and my son’s ability to pick out every flaw in my spelling and grammar…</p>
<p>A shoe-in derives from someone who got their foot in the door.</p>
<p>Wis75, while care about spelling, grammar, and level of diction may be context sensitive, my short answer is “No.” Errors are worth correcting, whether to use the correct word in service of comprehension or simply to make the point that such issues in fact matter, as opposed to a “whatever” approach. A parallel might be that one’s manners might be relaxed if having dinner in front of the TV as opposed to a formal dinner out, but not to the point where one routinely chews with one’s mouth open or belches and farts with no consideration whatsoever. <now i’m=“” sure=“” that=“” will=“” garner=“” a=“” response=“”></now></p>
I wouldn’t say we were spelling it wrong, or pronouncing it wrong, it’s more that just major international place names adopt different names in different languages. I, for example, don’t complain that everytime I head a frenchman call my beloved city ‘Londres’ that he is pronouncing it wrong. </p>
<p>I have to say though, it is admirable (not admiral!) how the English language has managed to butcher some of Europe’s most beautiful city names. Munich, being one. How munchen becomes Munich is beyond me, as is the very english pronounciation of Florence.</p>
<p>Also, someone mentioned their annoyance when they saw ‘their’ used as a singular posessive pronoun. In england this has been commonplace for a long time, and is considered preferable to ‘his or her’ which is regarded as clumsy and unnecessarily politically correct. </p>
<p>A final note re. the spelling of necessary, in the UK many primary kids are taught the memory aid of ‘one coffee two sugars’ to remember the spelling of necessary, along with ‘big elephants can’t always use small entrances’ to remember the spelling of because. I had to use the latter well into 6th grade, i found the word so difficult!</p>
<p>I can see how Azincourt became Agincourt, and it’s a matter of (mis)pronunciation.
The trajectory of London to Londres or Firenza to Florence is a more complicated one.
I’ve had to adapt to British pronunciations of French names such as Beauchamp, Belvoir, Bellevue…</p>
<p>marite–and in many parts of the US you see European place names reused without a spelling change but blithely mispronounced. e.g. Versailles, IN is pronounced Versayles!</p>
<p>I’m not entirely sure this is true. In France they mispronounce “England” as “Albion” or “Angleterre.” Those French never pronounce anything correctly…</p>
<p>^^ given the inflexibility of our tongues [metaphorically speaking] and the difficulty we have with picking up new accents this is probably best. I, for one, tend to sound like I am coughing up phlegm if I try to pronounce Barcelona with a Spanish accent so, for the sake of those in my company, it is safer to stick to the English pronunciation. :p</p>
<p>Spelling is related to hearing- my grade school nemesis was “separate” on a spelling test, “ah” versus “er” sound. I thought I had added a letter early this am but it wasn’t, and will NEVER be worth always correcting spelling, especially on these forums. Maybe I will relax and not bother with any corrections since I can’t ever be perfect… I’m sure a lot of the misspellings seen are because posters, especially kids, dash off their responses without worrying (obsessing) over correctness.</p>
<p>Most of my garbled sentences here on CC are because my kids interrupt me. And that’s fine; they’re only young once. I have related before that Mozilla Firefox (the Web browsing software) includes a spell-checker that works on online forms, like the forms we use to submit posts here.</p>