Grammar and spelling
While I do not always write grammatically correct and have the occasional spelling error or typo, it still bothers me to see it in articles and posts. The question is this: does it bother others, and if so, does it lower your opinion of the author and the subject at hand?
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I insisted that regardless of what their friends did, whenever they communicated electronically, they must always use proper English, full sentences, correct spelling and punctuation.
Years later, they actually thanked me for insisting on these things when they were young, citing their observations that many of their friends and others seem "dumbed down" and even incapable of formulating coherent messages when communicating electronically.
Anyway, thanks for the interesting post that allowed me the opprtunity to wdml (walk down memory lane).
That is, the emotion was there, human awareness developed later.
Well, with that (preceding) paragraph, I have managed to detach from the original intent of your comment. I think.
I'm not sure what you are referring to when you say "Orwellian Newspeak".
The enormous number of words (vocabulary) in the English language is due to the constant influx of new cultures and languages into that small island.
I had three years of Latin in high school---figured it would help when I studied anatomy and medicine in Vet School, and was a member of Junior Classical League. It was there I became enamored of word derivation. For example, the word enthralled is derived from I believe Old Norse, "thrall" meaning slave.
Another interesting result of the study of language is its aid in the determination of migration/invasion patterns of the various peoples of the world. Nowadays of course DNA studies are also being used.
Do you know what the word is that I am referring to? Streamline is close, but is not the word I'm looking for.
MS Word has a Grammar checker also. I worked a project in factory automation with a young colleague who just came from an advertising agency. Our manager insisted that we use the grammar checker in Word. We immediately made it fail half a dozen times. That said, I still use it. It is hard to proofread your own work.
In Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology Ayn Rand explains that the function of concepts is to allow us to subsume an unlimited number of examples under one word. Perhaps that is your "less is more" intention.
I caution against Orwellian Newspeak in which fewer and fewer words are employed. English enjoys a vocabulary of almost 1 million words. We cite Aristotle with gay abandon, but his world was described in about 50,000 words.
The Greeks did invent new words for new ideas. "Cosmopolitan" - a citizen of the world, not just one city - is an example. But it is put together from smaller words in their own language.
In modern English, if you let your kids camp out in the back yard, they might build a wigwam behind the verandah, two "Indian" words that have enriched our language and given us more power of thought.
The primary use of language is to enable thinking. Communication with others is a secondary use.
There's a word for that, using less to get more. Streamlining comes close but I think there's a better world, I mean word.
I suspect we all hacks to a degree.
Thanks for responding; greatly appreciated.
However, English orthography is a bitch. The spellchecker is a godsend.
Regarding grammar, as English evolved, we shed many rules, but kept many archaisms that we accept without question.
1 hand 2 hands
1 man 2 men
1 deer 2 deer
1 ox 2 oxen
Writing an email, I said, "I will recommend to my wife that she call you." Then I stopped. The grammar is correct, but will sound wrong to anyone who does not understand the grammar.
Far more common - and annoying to me -is the use of the prepositional object as the subject of a sentence. "A group of men are going...." However, it is so common that it would not affect my opinion of a post placed here.
Also, online, even I write off-the-cuff. I do read and edit my posts within the 15-minute window. And I was criticized once for changing my statements while that other person was replying. But, mostly, online writing is informal. Because we all make mistakes, I am bothered only by the most egregious cases.
(I insist to my wife at tax time that the W-2s prove that I am a professional writer. Obviously, I care about grammar, spelling, and syntax. There was one time, my boss made me undo several pages back to the original (wrong) state. I did it. But I came home angry. I took down a dictionary and showed my wife the definition of hack:
"a writer who works for pay without regard for personal or professional standards." She smiled and said, "That's OK, honey, most writers have to quit their jobs to become hacks." )