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Am I imagining it or are spelling, punctuation, and grammar rapidly getting worse? For example, it's become very common to put question marks at the ends of statements to indicate uncertainty. No one seems to know how to spell led, no one, all right, or its (my phone autocorrects it to it's every time, which may be the reason). And the past participle seems to be going extinct. People are saying things that sound, to my ear, utterly retarded, like "should have went". The only one I haven't heard yet is was instead of been. But I'm sure that's coming soon.
Is this just normal language evolution or is it an actual degradation? I think it's actual degradation because I actually am finding it increasingly difficult to parse these grammatically off sentences. For example, the situations in which you can use singular 'they' have expanded to include specific known people and I usually have to take a second to figure out that the speaker isn't referring to multiple people.
Spelling has been stable for a long time, but now people are pushing up against the limits of what their autocorrect will allow them to get away with. If an incorrect spelling is the correct spelling for a different word, it's going to be used and frequently. Are people just spelling at the level of third graders and their phones are saving them from looking like complete imbeciles?
But it seems to be getting worse. Is it because the average intelligence online is falling as it gets easier to use the internet? I don't think so, because I see otherwise intelligent people make a lot of these mistakes. Maybe it's because it used to be that most of what we read had been written (had was wrote for my future audience) by professional writers instead of average people.
There also seems to be a general decades long decline in the quality of even professional writing of unknown cause. Compare a newspaper article or even worse a scientific journal article from today versus 70 years. The fact that even proofreading for missing words, spelling mistakes, or the terrible grammar of a Chinese scientist seems to be a thing of the past, suggests that the problem is partly one of demand. We just don't care that what we read is well written anymore. Why is that?
Use words is for take my idea, put in your head. If idea in your head, success. Why use many "proper" word when few "wrong" word do trick?
A central tension within the concept of communication is between efficiency and precision. Larger lexicons and more complex signifier structures are less efficient to parse, but are better able to capture fine distinctions of meaning.
Even within a given language, this trade-off may be handled differently in different contexts. Jargon--properly used--is an example of domain-specific terms that are mostly not used outside that domain (something like an optional DLC for the base language), but have high precision within the native context. (It's the mark of a corrupted field of knowledge when the 'jargon' is used to obfuscate meaning, rather than identify a relevant concept precisely.)
The other end of the spectrum would be practically undefined interjections like "dude" for a Californian surfer. Tone, volume, affect, etc. carry all of the communicative weight, but this is acceptable because the intended expression is an emotive reaction to the given context--most people find it easy to distinguish between a cheerful greeting, a surprised reaction, dismayed disbelief, or judging censure--and the finer details are either not important or may be further clarified with additional words.
Valid. Still, most communication is not on the Pareto frontier of efficiency and precision. In my experience, grammatical issues are a thing that causes communication to move away from that frontier, but not the main thing (or even that substantial compared to muddled thinking on both ends of the communication, or anti-inductive dynamics).
Or as Grugg might say, "Few word move idea only ok, but many word for sake of many word still move idea only ok. Many word done badly, less ok than few word".
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Because it takes more time to read something written this way.
Grugg ask, read few wrong word take more time per idea, or per word? Grugg say look at Motte before answer.
I actually don't understand this.
Grugg admit, Grugg concise to point of parody, parody obscure point Grugg try to make. Grugg try again in normal English.
When you say it takes more time to read something concise but flawed than something wordy but grammatically correct, are you counting that time per word, or per idea successfully communicated, or by some other metric? There is a pattern of people writing thousands of words to communicate something that could have been expressed equally well in dozens of words. This pattern has been noted many times in the past (e.g. "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."), but is particularly pronounced here on the Motte. Even if you have to spend 3 times as long per word to parse something with grammatical issues, you still may end up spending less time than you would have spent reading something that is grammatically flawless but ten times longer than it needs to be.
The metric would be per idea, but it's probably per word too, because it's rare that the problem is not enough words. There is a separate problem of people using too many words to express an idea, but my patience for that is short enough that I usually just stop reading.
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