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I beg your pardon, I was trying to crack a funny. It seems it is impossible to parody an extremist belief without somebody mistaking it for the general article. I was attempting to parody the fundamentalist debating pedant point of view. Poe’s Law strikes again: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poes_Law
The depressing thing is I can imagine people genuinely making the exact suggestion you made, with no humour at all. Sorry!
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I know people smarter than the vast majority of HN users (how can this really be judged, sure, but I'd place money on it, certainly far, far smarter than me) who wouldn't know those, and I know many, many people who are damn smart (just not fitting them into the "smarter than most people here", but definitely smart enough to belong here if they wanted to) who also wouldn't know them.
I beg your pardon, I was trying to crack a funny. It seems it is impossible to parody an extremist belief without somebody mistaking it for the general article. I was attempting to parody the fundamentalist debating pedant point of view. Poe’s Law strikes again: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poes_Law
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They are homophones not homonyms - normally I wouldn't be so pedantic, but in a thread around the idea of people having prove they know meanings/spellings/etc, it seems suitible.
Don't you think it's ironic then that you misspelled "suitable"?
But you can also say, "It is poor form to loose (let free from restraint) your temper (agitated state of mind) in a discussion group."
Am I to understand from the title that we are equating “poor spelling/grammar in English” with “idiot”? Or is there some more subtle mechanism at work, such as equating “can’t be bothered to stare at hard-to-read-text just to post lulz, wat?” with “idiot”?
We are equating that after years of education, with the subject of English (albeit American English) being a core class for EVERY YEAR of attendance, and with spell checkers on most forum communities, that if someone still goes out of their way to transpose "lose" with "loose", then, yes, they are probably an idiot.
The Internet has democratized widely published writing. There is no quality control over comments, except through communities. At the same time, there are large populations who place are undereducated and place little value on education, while they do prize the ability to get a rise out of others.
An unfortunate consequence of this: reading more used to make me feel smarter and I'd sound more literate. Nowadays, through reading reading I tend to absorb things like "loose" for "lose" and other atrocious sounding quirks.
There is a clear market for quality text, and there is power in being the provider of it.
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They are homophones not homonyms - normally I wouldn't be so pedantic, but in a thread around the idea of people having prove they know meanings/spellings/etc, it seems suitible.
Don't you think it's ironic then that you misspelled "suitable"?
So people who are detail-oriented grammarians are necessarily good commenters? Since when? The assumption here is that you can tell a comment is going to be stupid by testing whether or not the person understands homonyms. The only thing you check with that is language ability. I'd argue you'd be better off searching for common internet memes and cliches instead of original thinking -- since that's a sign of a lazy o…
Say: George F. Will vs. Rush Limbaugh.
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This sounds like a social signal, not a cause-and-effect relationship. You are not establishing that some quality of being an idiot causes someone to have poor grammer, you are saying that the ought to know their grammar “just because.” Your argument reminds me of the argument that someone ought to wear a suit and tie to work: There is no excuse for not knowing that a suit and tie is what people wear to work, and any…
You don't always need causation, sometimes correlation is enough. EDIT: To clarify, it doesn't have to be that stupidity causes bad grammar, but if bad spellers are likely to be bad commenters, that's all you need.
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They are homophones not homonyms - normally I wouldn't be so pedantic, but in a thread around the idea of people having prove they know meanings/spellings/etc, it seems suitible.
It's suitable, not suitible - normally I wouldn't be so pedantic, but in a thread around the idea of people having to prove they know meanings/spellings/etc, it seems apropriate.
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There's no excuse not to know common homonyms and misspellings. A smart person who has trouble with them knows they have trouble with them, knows what they are, and knows to double check himself. If you don't do at least that, you probably aren't that bright. We'll forgive the less common words like your "grammer".
I'm not an English native speaker. Their/they're/their also stings my eyes when incorrectly used, but I must admit that I often do the lose/loose mistake. But that's fair, whoever uses a grammar that is loose, lose.
:)