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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3931 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 12, 2023

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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?

For example, it's become very common to put question marks at the ends of statements to indicate uncertainty.

But that's not a bad thing? I've picked up that habit from 2000s internet culture and I honestly like it.

The rest just seems like Eternal September. Once smartphones allowed any asshole with a pulse to use the internet, we got to see what a 530 SAT Verbal score looks like first-hand.

I have an enormous list of pet peeves about this issue, from things I see way too often online. Like my ever-growing list of words I see commonly confused — like "wary" vs. "weary" (which aren't even homophones!), or "cue" vs. "queue" (where too many end up deciding on "que" which isn't even an English word!), or "prosecute" vs. "persecute". (I think the worst I ever saw, though, was someone who consistently used "hieratic" when they meant "heretic.") There's the increasing neglect of the vocative comma (or as one member of a writing group I attended for a time colorfully called it, the "let's eat Grandma" comma). The serious misunderstandings of the paragraph-placement-in-dialogue rule (likely driven at least partially by the way they, IME, tend to teach it in school). Increasing usage of "sat" in contexts calling for "sitting" or "seated" (i.e. something like "John was sat in the chair").

That said, I'll confess to an unfortunate tendency, particularly when typing quickly, to mixing up the possessive determiner "its" and the contraction "it's."

Que is just ridiculous. I don't know of any language where that combination of letters would be pronounced the same as cue.

Another, one I've been seeing lately is disinterested instead of uninterested. Disinterested means something else.

On a related topic, I get really annoyed by some very common mispronunciations like processes pronounced like processeese as though it were the plural of processis or biases pronounced as though it were the plural of biasis. This is extremely common among supposedly educated people.

Disinterested means something else.

Please explain.

Uninterested means not interested. Disinterested means not having a stake in something. For example, the judge should be disinterested, but not uninterested in the case.

Thanks!

Old writing can be turgid at times. Modern writing is easier to read, but sometimes you can tell if it's written by AI or a freelancer, as there are quirks in the writing or it seems overly formal to the point or hurting readability, or it comes off as awkward. For example "the Bitcoin price fell today" instead of "the price of Bitcoin fell today". But overall , from the blogs and articles I have read, new writing is not bad. There are many bloggers and journalists who are competent writers, such as Freddie deBoer and James Altucher. Some of Freddie's recent stuff, in terms of the prose, organization, and the flow of the writing, is top tier. Individual skill varies greatly. Back in the 'old' days, it tended to only the most educated, in a formal sense, who wrote, but nowadays literacy is been commoditized, so there is more quantity and consequently variability of skill. But it's not worse, but more like needing to know where to look.

For example, it's become very common to put question marks at the ends of statements to indicate uncertainty

I do this in text conversations. It takes the place of a certain tone of voice, and is just useful. It's just language changing, 2000s english has a number of errors by the standards of 1900s english, which has errors by the standards of 1800s english, and so on and so on in an often continuous process until eventually it's mutually incomprehensible.

No one seems to know how to spell led, no one, all right, or its

I think people, especially dumber people, have made these sorts of mistakes for a long time, but 1) we see a lot more writing by average people than we did in the past due to the internet, and 2) typing is a lot faster and more casual than writing with a pen so people care less about little mistakes.

Also, though, english spelling conventions are dumb. Why not just have a simpler, understandable correspondence between phonemes and spelling? Like, chinese characters were horrendously complicated until they were Simplified, and there's still a lot more complexity there than is necessary, but it was a net benefit.

Compare a newspaper article or even worse a scientific journal article from today versus 70 years

Not sure about the news, but there is a lot more science being done today than there was 70 years ago, so the % that are high human capital necessarily decreases.

Also, though, english spelling conventions are dumb. Why not just have a simpler, understandable correspondence between phonemes and spelling? Like, chinese characters were horrendously complicated until they were Simplified, and there's still a lot more complexity there than is necessary, but it was a net benefit.

In law, at least, convention is important. The placement of commas can decide cases. I think this is where written English succeeds, because it's so precise, from the choice of words to the grammar.

There's a reason why there's a plethora of controlled versions of English.

I feel like putting all this together is mixing very different categories of errors.

There are errors more common with native speakers that stem from learning the language phonetically and unconsciously, without thinking about the logic or formal meaning of what you're saying, such as "should of", then/than mixups or "irregardless".

There are errors more common with ESL people that stem from English spelling and grammar being arbitrary nonsense. It is impossible to derive irregular verb forms of which there are many, and impossible to derive the spelling of a word from hearing it.

As a mix of both, many ESL people struggle with using the correct article because their language doesn't have an analogous concept of definite vs indefinite nouns.

And there are "errors" which are prescriptivist nonsense. By whose measure is "noone" not an acceptable compound but "someone" is? Why does the moronic norm that the comma and period at the end my second paragraph should be inside the quotation marks persist?

Why does the moronic norm that the comma and period at the end my second paragraph should be inside the quotation marks persist?

If the punctuation goes inside or outside is a matter of debate and taste. Having it inside looks nicer because it's adjacent to the quote and the letter, so it's somewhat hidden. .

Why does the moronic norm that the comma and period at the end my second paragraph should be inside the quotation marks persist?

As a programmer I just see that as stupid. I don't particularly mind punctuation inside quotation marks, but if you are going to have it then you must also have extra punctuation outside the quotation mark too, otherwise it's just like mismatched parentheses.

What gets me is when people call them the 60’s or the 90’s instead of the ‘60s or ‘90s.

Chuck Bednarik was number 60 for the Philadelphia Eagles, who won the super bowl in 1960. By convention, that means that the decade beginning in 1960 belongs to him, and is thus 60's.

Possible explanation: "Public writing" has a lower barrier to entry than it used to, both in terms of who can do it and how easy it is to write something for public consumption. This means more of that writing will be sloppy, which in turn lowers the expectations people have of themselves (people emulate what they see), so the standard amount of effort is lower and people who would in other circumstances have written carefully are sloppier too.

Putting question marks at the end of statements to indicate uncertainty is just a stylistic fad, though.

This is the most likely explanation for why writing seems dumb today compared to in the past . The second explanation: the rise of 'corpspeak', which is intended to be as inoffensive as possible, and politically-correct language.

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.

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".

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.

This is a combination of Eternal September reducing the IQ of the average internet user from the potential >130 peak in the earliest days to being barely above average today, as well as the evolution of linguistic norms as well as a general acceptance of more casual conversational styles.

I'm a stickler for correct grammar myself, and it causes me psychic damage when other Indians butcher the language, even if I acknowledge there is no "objective" correctness in language, beyond being able to accurately convey meaning. English is a fucked up language, where words often don't sound like they're written, so I can hardly hold it against those who fuck it right back haha.

It drives me berserk when my smartphone's autocorrect fucks up a perfectly grammatical sentence, but then again it's how I wrote 200k words of my novel and most of my Motte posts, so I guess it's a net positive..

I notice what you're noticing, but apart from some extreme outliers, it never actually affects my ability to understand what the person writing is saying.

I think I have a different opinion on this depending on the day or the direction of the wind - one day I'm cringing to myself because a friend keeps using "than" when she means "then" in private text messages between the two of us that no one else will ever read, the next day I'm defending on principle that "ain't" as a replacement for both "isn't" and "am not" is perfectly reasonable, comprehensible, has long-since achieved its legitimacy, and that anyone who would judge someone negatively for using it is a nitpicking pedant.

At the edges of this, my instinct is to say that lots of the examples you brought up, on their own, seem minor to me and don't seem like signals of a linguistic descent into madness and incomprehensibility. I do the question mark thing sometimes, for example. There's a certain threshold for variation that I can tolerate just fine if the actual intent remains clear. But, like I said, I come from the viewpoint of someone who's almost always able to understand imperfect English writing without any fuss. Maybe a lot of these deviations would make the intent much less clear to someone who speaks English as a second language.

At the core of it though ... I'm with you. I wish people considered it more important to try to write well. I wish more people wanted to write well in text messages, facebook posts, youtube comments, magazine articles, newspaper columns, job cover letters, classified ads, yelp reviews, and birthday cards. I wish more young people, middle-aged people and older people wanted to write well, and I wish they wanted to do it without other people telling them they should want to. I think my standards for "writing well" are probably much lower than yours. I don't even write particularly well, from an objective standpoint. But I do have standards, and they do mean something to me.

At the end of the day, maybe it doesn't amount to more than just a strong aesthetic preference. I feel like I'll be able to easily comprehend any writing shifts, trends, degradation, or shortcuts for efficiency that may lie ahead. But is it enough to just be able to literally understand people?

Efficiency and comprehensibility are what are being lost. When you reduce the size of your vocabulary, mix up words, and misuse punctuation, it causes me to have to do a double take to understand. I can read much more efficiently when something is written properly. It's even making me read properly written text more slowly, because for example I'll read the word than and think they probably meant then and then I get to the end of the sentence and realize it makes no sense and they really did mean than. This additional post-processing of the sentence slows me down. It's very frustrating and I didn't use to do it.

Thinks I imagination use y’all.

Are we really doing worse at grammar than the AOL days? Than the cursed shorthands demanded by T9 phone keyboards? I’m skeptical, but I don’t know how this could be measured.

I think we're worse than just five years ago, but I'm not sure.

I don't think it's necessarily an intelligence issue as much as an ESL issue. Currently America is being overwhelmed with non-English speaking aliens ranging from South America to Africa to Somali to Eastern European. None of these people speak English at a high level or are particularly knowledgeable about proper English grammar. A large part of it is being out of practice as well; I know my own knowledge of grammar isn't particularly strong either especially when it comes to sentence structure. This leads to people passively learning 'well enough' communication where there's a general understanding of direction but no nuance.

Maybe this is the lesson of the tower of Babel. When a civilization has the means and resources to build a massive tower, economic opportunists who do not understand and have limited ability to communicate start crating stagnation through gridlock - no one can understand each other well enough to organize logistics.

You’re overselling it.

The English-only population grew by 54M between 1980 and 2019. Everyone else, including multilingual and no-English, grew by 45M. And apparently the multilingual population has gotten better at English, possibly due to high-education immigrants. Source.

What would you say is the threshold for being “overwhelmed”?

In the past four years (which is outside your dataset) there have been 10 million illegal border crossings. Even if the multilingual population is getting better at spoken and written English, they probably lack the formal education that is required to not bastardize a countries native language.

There may have been 10m illegal border crossings recorded but it’s very unlikely the total illegal population rose from ~14m to 24m in that time.

I agree that illegal population probably hasn't increased compared to the number of illiit border crossings, but Even the low end estimate of 2.4 million is significant enough to change the English lexicon, with the high end being about 3.8 million, larger than the population of most states.

That CBP dataset includes expulsions and repatriations. Last time I looked at it, they made up most of the total; people were getting caught and thrown out. The 2023 figures look similar. There must be some getting through, but it’s going to be significantly less than 10 million.

As for bastardizing, the census link says the percentage with “very good” English was what increased. Regardless of what illegals are doing to the bottom of the distribution, the upper part is apparently learning. Or immigrating with existing skill. Perks of a lingua franca.

Are you able to orally recite word for word any stories, poems, epics, etc.? Maybe you know a few by heart, but you probably wouldn't be able to match what the Greeks passed e.g. the Iliad or the Odyssey, and even if you somehow did, most people wouldn't. That doesn't mean our memories are worse, it's just that there is no need to memorize word for word entire stories because you can just pick up a book, or your phone, and read it.

Similarly, spelling and punctuation just seems to be a skillset that's not as important anymore. When it took months for your message to get across to someone across the planet, you better hope you wrote your message properly. Writing in ink also meant fixing mistakes would be a laborious and expensive exercise. Now you can just edit to fix your post later, or clarify in a follow up tweet/text.

I'm not surprised spelling and punctuation has gotten worse. I'm probably worse at it today than I was back in high school or college. That's because my phone or computer will autocorrect 90% of my errors, so I'm not as careful anymore. Why get good at spelling if your writing device will fix it for you? Focus on the content/message instead.

Edit: I remembered something quite humorous, one Timothy Dexter from the 18th century, who wrote a book filled with misspelling and no punctuations, and in the 2nd edition just put a page full of punctuation marks to "pepper and salt as you please." See Sam O'Nella's youtube video for an entertaining summary.

Despite his complete lack of knowledge (or care) for writing and penmanship, he set out to compose a work that would out-wit Shakespeare, and rival the learnedness of Milton. His working title (which, of course, made absolutely no sense): “A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, or Plain Truths in a Homespun Dress.” The book was atrociously misspelled, and entirely devoid of punctuation — there were no periods, no commas, no dashes or semicolons — it was merely a jumbled mess of nearly incomprehensible writing.

Clearly people were just as capable of making spelling and grammatical mistakes in the past, we are probably filtered to look at the works of the most intelligent and well-educated people, and there probably was a greater cultural emphasis on proof-reading and editing. Even 50 years ago it would be quite an effort to publish something for the world to see, you'd probably need to be educated and have connections, now any random Joe can just tweet his thoughts to the world.

Similarly, spelling and punctuation just seems to be a skillset that's not as important anymore.

My nephew is 23 and started his first year of medical school this semester. From kindergarten to present he has never had any formal instruction in spelling in school. Ever. His teachers say they stopped teaching spelling under the assumption the kids would just "pick it up" as they read. To be fair his entire pre-college education was ~99% concerned with passing standardized tests at an extremely poor rural school district. Things may well be different in schools with more resources. I can say with confidence he is entirely incapable of spelling the English language correctly without spellchecking software of some sort and accidentally uses the wrong homonym about 50% of the time. Than/then and there/their/they're are essentially the exact same word for him; the meaning of the word is only deduced from context, not spelling. He finished his undergrad with no issues.

My understanding is that several school districts across the country have periodically rolled out (and then revoked) what amounts to an "immersion" program for English grammar. It becomes popular, people try it and they realize it is crap, take it away....and then bring it back out years later. If you are raised during one of the rollouts...it fucking sucks.

Isn't spelling kind of important for a doctor? He could kill people with misspelled prescriptions.

Nah it was a historical problem back in the days of handwriting but these days communication is almost all by electronic medical records, sometimes people will give out hard prescriptions but it is easy for doctors to dial in and make it legible. More than spelling you used to have issues dosages and frequencies in the handwritten days though.

Incidentally many medications are either super easy to spell (often brand names) or absolutely fucking impossible without external help.

Considering your nephew is going to medical school he's clearly intelligent but it is shocking to hear that even intelligent individuals have that much issue with spelling, considering how often you'd come across someone complaining about bad grammar. People used to make songs/parodies about grammar and spelling, such as Weird Al's Word Crime or youtuber Jack film's Raping vs Rapping. I wonder if there is similar content being produced for entertainment nowadays poking fun at spelling/grammar, or if the next generation just don't care anymore.

I wondered if bad spelling or grammar can lead to a death, similar to how doctors' sloppy handwriting killed 7000 annually but I can't come up with a plausible scenario similar to the bad handwriting one, and there doesn't seem to be any such cases.

Is this in the United States?

That seems so alien to my experience with school.

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