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Why the global elite gave up on spelling and grammar

wsj.com

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Re: Why the global elite gave up on spelling and grammar

#203

Post by cyberax »

kstrauser wrote: post #5
triceratops wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before smartphones/autocorrect/dictation it was worse. Ima call bullshit on this. Read the published letters of some historical figures.

Survivorship bias. You don't often read the notes where Thomas Jefferson jotted "hey martha riding to ftore be back later love you - Tommy".

Nope. I have a bunch of family letters, and my great-grandmother put more effort into writing simple "Happy !" postcards than some people do for their college applications. And she worked on a farm, and only had just 5 years of formal education.

The modern devolution of spelling is just not giving a fuck about norms and courtesy.

Re: Why the global elite gave up on spelling and grammar

#204

Post by bitwize »

bluepeter wrote: post #22

British aristocracy has been pronouncing their own surnames wrong for centuries on purpose. Cholmondeley is "Chumley" Featherstonehaugh is "Fanshaw." If you read it phonetically you mark yourself as an outsider. The misstake is the membership card. (Heck, even in Portland we locals hear about misprouncing Couch St probably every year in local press as some bar for membership to our own locals only vibe.)

In New Orleans, protesters against outsiders acquiring and developing real estate hold up signs that read "Say Tchoupitoulas" (/ˌtʃɑp ə ˈtuː ləs/). I give my wife lots of hassle about the pronunciations of Louisiana place names like Tchoupitoulas, Natchitoches (/ˈnæk ə ˌdɪʃ/, really!), etc. especially when she complains about northeastern place names like "Leominster".

Re: Why the global elite gave up on spelling and grammar

#206

Post by throw4847285 »

pessimizer wrote: post #184

Most of these people are legitimately stupid. This article is also pretty stupid for focusing on grammar and spelling when the content of these emails is also quite moronic. I don't think Larry Summers was fired for hanging out with Epstein and talking terribly about women with him; I'm sure plenty of people knew that he was an Epstein-type and hung in Epstein-type circles, and he publicly said horrible things about…

It's funny that for all the complaints people have about the accuracy of The Social Network, the aspect that has aged the worst is that Larry Summers is depicted as clever and witty.

Re: Why the global elite gave up on spelling and grammar

#207

Post by skygazer »

rendall wrote: post #196

I'm just plain cannot visit archive.* sites anymore. Just get a looping captcha.

Probably your DNS -- the archive.today guy is a stickler that dns must pass client subnet to partially deanonymize visitors, and for instance, cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 server doesn't pass it. I think that's still the case.

Re: Why the global elite gave up on spelling and grammar

#208

Post by gwern »

janalsncm wrote: post #152

> But in another instance, Epstein was critical of misspelling. A contact forwarded the sex offender his daughter’s college application in 2013. “I wish you had let me review before sending…the grammatical errors and spelling mistakes will make it at least harder for early admission,” Epstein wrote. It is funny that spelling and grammar matter more when writing to an admissions officer than to a potential business pa…

Also just differing levels of relevance. You don't talk with a businessman or investor or famous people in general because of their writing; if you made a list of relevant skills, 'proper spelling when quickly texting from a phone' surely doesn't crack even the top ten thousand skills. In academia, on the other hand, writing a formal application properly is a core skill.

Re: Why the global elite gave up on spelling and grammar

#209

Post by lumost »

radpanda wrote: post #110
bluepeter wrote: post #22

British aristocracy has been pronouncing their own surnames wrong for centuries on purpose. Cholmondeley is "Chumley" Featherstonehaugh is "Fanshaw." If you read it phonetically you mark yourself as an outsider. The misstake is the membership card. (Heck, even in Portland we locals hear about misprouncing Couch St probably every year in local press as some bar for membership to our own locals only vibe.)

I don't really see that as the same thing as what the article was pointing out. Those are shibboleths that only an insider would know. You have to get the pronunciation of Cholmondeley or Couch "right" to pass for an insider. The random misspellings, missing spaces, sloppy grammar, etc in the examples in the article seem different to me. Misspelling "en route" as "enriewu" doesn't show, "look, I know the secret count…

Or its a simple signifier that the author was human, and that a real person is trying to convince you of something. I've experimented with putting minor grammar mistakes into my work of the sort that would be frowned upon, but are not strictly invalid. The existence of any kind of mistake makes the work sound "human".
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