Spelling Errors: Stupid? Lazy? Or A-OK?

[Alex]

Originally Posted by Morrigoon

The problem of the abused apostrophe is endemic at this point. I see it absolutely everywhere. Even if someone questioned whether they should use the apostrophe, they would have only too look at their environment to have the wrong choice reinforced.

Wouldn't normally do this, but you used the bolded word incorrectly and exactly opposite of its meaning. Epidemic is what you wanted (spread throughout the environment as opposed to native or localized to a very specific environment).

Let's make this thread the "pointless pedantry" equivalent of the Sooo... thread or one of the random thoughts thread. The appropriate thing would be to post how I'm wrong and then we can argue over the detailed parsing of medical vocabularies spread into the vernacular.


As for the article I don't think it meant to say that the rules really are too difficult to learn but that obviously they are difficult enough that many people haven't learned them. And that by the time you are teaching college classes it isn't worth the distraction of responding to them to the detriment of the actual class. That ultimately, knowing whether something is an affect or an effect is not particularly important to understanding the proper application of carbon dating.

And I think the last paragraph in the article is the key one. He isn't calling for wholesale abandonment of spelling rules and willy nilly ad hoc redefinition of variants. Simply that there are some words so commonly misspelled that maybe it is time to stop wasting energy calling them mistakes and move on.


Finally, my most recent example of egregious apostrophes:



Egregious because it is unnecessary and contributes to the suggestion that there is fun in Modesto.