Wednesday 6 February 2008
Tuesday 5 February 2008
First World illiteracy
My brazilian friends will thank me for these hints, but I only wish first-laguage English speakers would bother with them...
After spending an entire night surfing on the IMDb discussion forums, I've become more and more irked with posters' incapability of writing proper English. I don't like to be picky about this stuff - afterall, even native speakers are allowed to make mistakes every so often -, but some of the stuff I read really crosses the line between typos and common mistakes; it's basic grammer and word meanings that people repeatedly get wrong, which only shows that they truly believe it is correct. Net-speak is one thing, folks, but there is a difference between being lazy and writing "how r u?" (perfectly acceptable, as is using colloquialisms like "wanna" and "gotta"), and confusing the noun "effect" and the verb "to affect"!!
In the end, reading these kind of mistakes in what could otherwise be perfectly intelligent posts becomes even more annoying than those illegible attempts at ebonics ("dis", etc.), some people write with (similar to miguxo-talk in portuguese). But please, people! Just when you're winning points by using the contracted form of "it is" correctly, do you have to ruin it by using "effect" as a verb, as in this phrase I read on the Le Divorce boards: "...people don't judge them for it as it's none of their business, unless it effects them personally."???
Another common mistake which can really put me off reading comments is the mix-up between "there", "their" and "they're" (as in the contraction of "they are"). Is it really that difficult to know the difference between an adverb/noun and a pronoun?! And there's worse, such as the more and more common "could of", "should of" and "would of". Those are positively cringe-worthy! "Of" is not a verb folks! Remember, pronunciation is not the same thing as spelling (and English is one of the worst languages when it comes to mathing pronunciation with spelling). You may pronounce it "of", but you write it "'ve", i.e. you are saying "could have", "should have", "would have", contraction "could/should/would've".
Honestly, it's beginning to scare me just how bad some of these can get, coming from native English speakers, from both sides of the pond. Here in Brazil, we may complain about functional illiteracy, but at least we're moving forward in that department. So why are our so called "First World" countries, world leaders in educational excellence (not that we can really say that of the States), taking such a huge step back? Is that what we should look forward to? A society where people are so lazy to read that they forget what they already barely learnt at school?
If I think of more mistakes, or find a few hilarious examples, I'll edit this post....
Hahahaha...I got taken the piss out of for ranting about this on the IMDb off-topic forum (i.e. the one where you have threads like "This site is weird" and "Post here if you're a horny teenage boy"). Afterall, "dont worry itz only da internetz!!!"
After spending an entire night surfing on the IMDb discussion forums, I've become more and more irked with posters' incapability of writing proper English. I don't like to be picky about this stuff - afterall, even native speakers are allowed to make mistakes every so often -, but some of the stuff I read really crosses the line between typos and common mistakes; it's basic grammer and word meanings that people repeatedly get wrong, which only shows that they truly believe it is correct. Net-speak is one thing, folks, but there is a difference between being lazy and writing "how r u?" (perfectly acceptable, as is using colloquialisms like "wanna" and "gotta"), and confusing the noun "effect" and the verb "to affect"!!
In the end, reading these kind of mistakes in what could otherwise be perfectly intelligent posts becomes even more annoying than those illegible attempts at ebonics ("dis", etc.), some people write with (similar to miguxo-talk in portuguese). But please, people! Just when you're winning points by using the contracted form of "it is" correctly, do you have to ruin it by using "effect" as a verb, as in this phrase I read on the Le Divorce boards: "...people don't judge them for it as it's none of their business, unless it effects them personally."???
Another common mistake which can really put me off reading comments is the mix-up between "there", "their" and "they're" (as in the contraction of "they are"). Is it really that difficult to know the difference between an adverb/noun and a pronoun?! And there's worse, such as the more and more common "could of", "should of" and "would of". Those are positively cringe-worthy! "Of" is not a verb folks! Remember, pronunciation is not the same thing as spelling (and English is one of the worst languages when it comes to mathing pronunciation with spelling). You may pronounce it "of", but you write it "'ve", i.e. you are saying "could have", "should have", "would have", contraction "could/should/would've".
Honestly, it's beginning to scare me just how bad some of these can get, coming from native English speakers, from both sides of the pond. Here in Brazil, we may complain about functional illiteracy, but at least we're moving forward in that department. So why are our so called "First World" countries, world leaders in educational excellence (not that we can really say that of the States), taking such a huge step back? Is that what we should look forward to? A society where people are so lazy to read that they forget what they already barely learnt at school?
If I think of more mistakes, or find a few hilarious examples, I'll edit this post....
Hahahaha...I got taken the piss out of for ranting about this on the IMDb off-topic forum (i.e. the one where you have threads like "This site is weird" and "Post here if you're a horny teenage boy"). Afterall, "dont worry itz only da internetz!!!"
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