Does it piss you off that people don't use proper English?
I hate it when I get emails that look like text messages. I hate it when I get text messages that look like text messages!
“ru going to the store wht doyou plan on buying??can you get me sum chz plz plz?!”
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HAHAHAHAHAHAH. it doesn’t make me mad, it just makes me sad for them and it makes me laugh sometimes to myself. how embarrassing to be an adult (in most cases) and not know how to spell simple words. my best friends mother is like this. she cannot spell anything. she went to college. i don’t understand and honestly it upsets me sometimes because i know she must be embarrassing herself at work with her colleagues on a daily basis.
Yeah. I hate it when people misspell things.
It is colour, not color and it is aluminium, not aluminum.
It drives me crazy.
Why would I let something so insignificant piss me off?
Yep, and it drives the kids nuts when I tell them thank you for letting me know they have to use the bathroom. Then it drives them nuts when I tell tham that they’re perfectly capable of using the bathroom.
Then they usually get it.
Agh. I absolutely hate it. Especially my best friend who thinks its cute to write bearly/beerly instead of barely. Granted I am guilty of typing like that. But that would only be when I’m extremely tired, or busy.
@silverfly I think @theichibun is insinuating that he/she wants to hear the word “may” used, rather than “can”.
Very much so. My friends think I’m a dork because I take the time to spell things correctly, use capitalization, and use punctuation in my texts. They’re the dorks! <shakes fist>
@jfos Yeah, I was thinking that too. Good catch.
An error that I have been seeing a lot of recently is the “unnecessary ‘of’ ”.
Is it that big a deal? (Not “is it that big of a deal?”
Nope.
(EDIT: Just read the bottom half!)
Yep.
It drives me insane. If you can’t spell something, it’s not so difficult to pick a dictionary. Come on! I can’t stand this text chat. ‘r u free 2nyt?’ ugh!
Anyway, it’s worrying.
@ragingloli Color vs. Colour isn’t really the problem though. That’s not a typo… just a difference in culture/country. Plz is much more obnoxious. And muh for my… Ugh!
For text messages it does not bother me at all. Short hand is appropriate in my opinion. It is important to me that people know what is correct though, for when it will be required, like in business, communicating with people formally. We should be able to speak/write both. If people can be fluent in two languages, we can certainly be fluent in proper English and shorthand English.
As for color and colour, and all other words that spelled one way in America and another in other countries, I think they are both correct. Using what is appropriate at the appropriate time and place is what matters. Although I do prefer using zed for z, less confusion with the letter c.
@ragingloli: I will remember that you do not think Canadian-English or US-English is correct English.
@silverfly: I have flirted with the idea of creating a phone application which automatically converts text messages to English but I don’t think there is enough money in it to be worth my time. Would you pay for this application?
Nee way man.Lifes our short.Tha nars worra mean like.
Um, is the question stated in proper English? Btw, which grammar rulebook would u suggest we use 4 electronic communication?
@ragingloli ”See? You people drive me crazy!”
You were crazy long before we came on the scene!
Yes. I get mad when the guy I’m dating won’t put in the effort to correct the multitude errors in his messages and it takes me three times as long as it should to read it. Ignorance is one thing, but laziness is another.
Nope, especially when it is used in a messaging context. The important thing to remember when using txt lingo is that the message should be understandable. If not, they get a “Huh?” reply.
@malevolentbutticklish No, I wouldn’t pay for the application. I don’t get too many crappy texts so I guess I’m just not used to it. I don’t think creating an app like this is really the solution I’d like to see.
@prolificus The question looks like proper English to me. And as for a grammar rulebook… Any standard book will do. Using the number 4 and u for “you” is out of a different book. I don’t recommend that one.
@davidbetterman
The first thing you must learn in temporal mechanics is that the effect can occur before the cause.
th bst n s whn y dnt s ny vwls :-)
idk, whateva lolololol
It annoys me a little, but as long as the message can be easily deciphered, the meaning is clear and there’s a point to it, then I don’t mind too much.
Yes, it’s annoying when people use excessive txtspk and such in online communication. It’s also annoying when people use terrible grammar. But really, I do not know a single person who speaks perfect English. I make mistakes all the time, so I can’t really get too mad at every person who says “i do that good.”
This unprincipled discrimination will not stand. Dyslexics of the world untie!
I don’t really care as long as it may be read.
Also it’s sabre, not saber. lawlz
Systems evolve. It’s inherent in system and chaos math. Languages are systems.
Grammatical, syntactic, and semantic precision are only necessary when the ideas and constructs being portrayed require such necessary precision. Grammatical fluidity is eventual in societies mainly concerned with simple or vague ideas.
@ragingloli So are you saying that the British spell color with a ‘u’ to tick of the Americans? That would be the effect before the cause.
Actually texting is one thing, but when I see a person using text speak on the computer I immediately assume it’s an immature and not real bright person on the other end.
@Val123 You would think this is true, but even at work I get several clients who use very poor communication. And they’re not even young! One client answers emails through the subject line. She doesn’t use punctuation, so I have to decipher her sentences. Sometimes I literally can’t understand what she wrote and I have to ask her. It’s embarrassing.
@silverfly Oh man. I used to work with a lady who totally dismissed her spell check corrections, claiming that the words were spelled right. They weren’t, of course.
The worst abuse of text-message-ish is when people use it in spoken English. I actually heard someone say “LOL”.
It really does drive me insane. Unfortunately, I can’t complain too much. For some reason my company’s terminal server causes a serious delay in my typing. It can’t keep up with my fingers so a lot of my words have typos in them or the letters wind up backwards. It’s embarrassing, really.
@Grisson I’ve heard this too… wtf or brb are pretty popular
@ragingloli I agree with you that most American spellings just seem wrong to me. Canada still uses most British spellings except we spell aluminium, as aluminum. Chemical names are arbitrary and when you are a country that exports huge amounts of that product to a huge country like the USA, when they order Aluminum, you don’t invoice them for Aluminium!
I am much more irritated with people who use improper grammar, careless spelling and slang.
Our written language communication should be more formal and more carefully prepared than our casual oral language. I mainly speak as carefully as I write. Most people don’t make that effort, but then again I probably get more strange looks!
Unless the writer is a non-native speaker of English, I will often ignore or privately rebuke them for their lack of courtesy to the rest of us.
I can’t say that is angers me, I’d never have time to calm down. i feel more like dismayed at the apparent lack of knowledge of proper English.
I stopped correcting people years ago. It is a bit presumptuous, and most people, when corrected, get either angry or say that they don’t care. My ex husband used to say; “Well you know what I mean.”
The problem I have is that I frequently don’t know what people mean. I never know if they literally mean what they’ve said, or if they mean what they would have said had they said it properly.
I correct my husband, because English is his second language, and he does want to speak English as well as possible, although he still sometimes gets annoyed that I correct him, but mostly he is receptive. I guess that is different than correcting a native speaker. And, I also would not correct a stranger the same way I correct him. The few times I have corrected a friend; it is usually because they are using a word that is not a word. For example orientated and irregardless. It is oriented and regardless (although one dictionary I looked up irregardless in said it was a synonym for regardless – sigh – and I guess orientated is accepted also, according to what I have been told, but I don;t know that or sure.
My girlfriend teaches college level courses and says she has students who write axe instead of ask. Come on now. But, my English is far from perfect also. I don’t mind being corrected, especially if it is a formal document, I appreciate it.
To @Trillian‘s point, sometimes people take offense to being corrected, when really you are trying to get to the actual meaning of what the person speaking to you wants to communicate. I agree, that is frustrating, when you are simply trying to clarify.
The different spellings in British and American English don’t bother me, English has all sorts of weirdness in spelling anyway, all sorts of exceptions. I don’t know if many other languages are like that, but Spanish for instance is almost always spelled exactly how you would guess by saying the word, not so in English.
Regarding text speak…Kansas license plates consist of three letters followed by three numbers. So far I’ve seen four cars with the letters “WTF” in front of the three numbers! :)
@silverfly yeah…uh… wtf means World Trade Federation, right?
@Val123 LOL. If you have seen that many, probably they are up to WTF in the issuing process. If someone purposely ordered WTF, I don’t think they would follow the standard format of three numbers following it. I am guessing there are many many WTF being issued in your state right now.
@JLeslie Yeah…they aren’t vanity plates. Vanity plates are ugly and have a picture of a buffalo on them!
I think it would be funny to have those plates.
We used to have one. It was so ugly! Wait..you mean a WTF plate, or a vanity plate? I don’t know what I’d do if I got a WTF plate, because I don’t like that term any more than the word that the last letter starts with!
In rereading this Q, I’m struck by the delicious irony that a lot of people who read it would think that the Q itself “Does it piss you off that…” (emphasis added) uses “improper” English.
Just an observation.
@JLeslie LOL! Can’t ya just see it? They hand me a WTF plate and I throw a fit, getting all insulted and moral! THEY’D be going, “WTF?” And I’D be going, “EXACTLY!!!”
@CyanoticWasp “piss you off” is an idiom. While not good form in that is colloquial, it is not actually incorrect grammar IMHO.
@Dr_Lawrence I never said or implied that it was incorrect grammar. But a lot of people (I’m sure you’ve seen the thread parallel to this one with similar wording) think that it’s not “proper English”, which was the wording of the Q.
Well, ya’ll, if the OP had said, “Don’t it piss you off when people doesn’t use currect English?” then we’d have a funny issue!
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