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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   3690 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 12, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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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?

I've noticed that people very seldom use the plural possessive apostrophe after s.

I've noticed that people very seldom use the plural possessive apostrophe after s.

Meanwhile, I've seen people using it in places where they shouldn't — that is, for nouns that aren't plural, but simply end in an "s." (I.e. writing something like "James' book" instead of the correct "James's book.")

I noticed this too, and I think it's common enough to the extent that now just adding on an apostrophe, with no "s" after, is a correct way to turn a singular noun that ends with an "s" into a plural. It's kinda like how "I could care less" is one correct way of conveying that "I care so little that it is physically impossible for me to care any less than I already do", or how putting the period or comma at the end of a quotation after the closing quotation mark, like I just did earlier in this sentence, is just as correct as putting it immediately before the quotation mark, because so many people kept doing the former despite what our English teachers taught us.

Possessive? And here I thought the apostrophe meant "here comes an 'S'"- but in fairness the concept that a kid's meal is a kids meal that could be the kids' meal is not something one needs to express on a daily basis.

I like to think that that, along with accurate usage of the semicolon, are the main signs of someone who can write somewhat acceptably.

They love to put apostrophe's into plural's where they don't belong though.

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