Enuf about grammer and more abought speling.


When someone is whiling away the hours, is "wile" or "while?" I needs to know.

Wile.

5. wile away, to spend or pass (time), esp. in a leisurely or pleasurable fashion: to wile away the long winter nights.

Danka

Poor spelling (and grammar for that matter) drives me crazy. I blame the watering-down of formal English teaching in schools, the need for mobile phone users to compress words in SMS messaging, and the Media for mangling language for marketing reasons.

Here are some that really light my wick:

“Fish ‘n Chips” – hell, “and” is such a complicated fvcking word.
“Let us do it right for you” – look creep, I know you’ll fvck it up big time.
“4NIC8R” – on license plates…I’ll bet you have a small dick.

It’s an erosion of standards…and I dread to think of the communications (verbal and written) that are going to flow from CEOs born in the Generation X ‘n [sic] Y errors [sic].

Example: “Youz have gota lift ur game if we r gonna xlr8 our market cher”.

Stoat shudders.

It's danke.

Bammo.

What's with these idiots that can't spell in German!

I have a friend by the name of Michael Danke, but it's pronounced "Dankee" - so I have an aversion to Danke as the Germanic Thank You. It just looks wrong to me, so I will always misspell it more phoenetically in my native English.

I don't claim to be some sort of amazing speller all the time. I'm a decent proofreader - when I bother - and even then it's very hard. I like to use a brightly colored piece of paper as a guide, since it allows me to focus on spelling. I also change the font and employ a number of bizarre tactics to proofread. I read the words in backward order.

Once thing that has me differing from others, at least grammatically, is my use of the Chicago Manual of Style. I like my comma before the and in a series. Other quirks seem to make their way into my writing that differs greatly from what I've seen on the West Coast.

Another thing that has gotten the better of me is the use of punctuation, capitalization, and even spelling in advertising and in what has become the accepted standard amongst a group of people. Sometimes there is a reason you would put the n' versus and or even & in Rock n' Roll, Rock and Roll, Rock & Roll. Balance in ad copy, the contrast and meaning it gives along with imagery... it all plays a part, and has even caused me to break a few of my cardinal rules while writing copy that's gone on billboards, catalogs, brochures and flyers.

I think - back to the original topic - that we should accept those who make mistakes, since a vast majority of us regularly participate in spelling and grammatical blunders (I'm pretty sure a good checker could find at least 6 in here. Or is that six? Oh, I do prefer to spell my numbers ten and under. 10 and under.), but not accept changes to long-standing rules.

It would probably make for more work, and before long we'll be spelling those words incorrectly.

This thread came to mind when I saw this news article today.