[ SECRET POST #2937 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2937 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 056 secrets from Secret Submission Post #420.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Another DA

This theory makes a lot of sense. I spent the last 10 years or so mostly reading fanfic. If I'd been younger and those were my formative years, I probably wouldn't be able to spell now, and I'm still not the best in the world. I read a lot of terrible books as a kid, but at least they were professionally edited and mostly free of typos. I didn't grow up reading twitter.

As a side note, I've noticed that even news websites like the BBC have started to have a shocking amount of typos in their news articles. There's a generation that grew up reading the internet and those people are now holding down professional jobs.

I was shopping on the Next website and they even spelled scarves as scarf's on their front page categories. This was supposed to be a professional business retail website. That's far from the only example. So this spread of errors is not a problem that's confined to fanfic.

I feel like an old fuddyduddy now, but honestly, 10-15 years ago professional websites weren't filled with so many basic spelling errors. Teenagers who grew up with the internet are now showing it as young adults, which surprises me. I thought other sources would cancel these kinds of errors out.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think it's just the Internet fault.

It's part of it, sure, but both the rush created by the Internet (no time to edit anything, things have to be published NOW) and many companies wanting to decrease costs (why pay for editors?) are also at fault for the many typos on professional websites.

[(Anonymous)]

NAYRT

The idea that editors can be dispensed with at all, though, is an issue created by the internet, where any and all content can be published without one. However you feel about them, when it came to print publications, editors were a 'gatekeeper' of sorts that ensured the vast majority of the things a reader saw were correct.

The internet made that role unnecessary. A whole generation has grown up without the concept of editing at all, let alone any realization of how important it is.

[(Anonymous)]

That's a disheartening theory, but you may be on to something. I've been on the internet since it's early days, and I can tell you that standards for expressing yourself in this medium have gone waaaaay down. (And it's not like they were super high in the first place.) It really is disturbing to me how many people reach adulthood and still don't know how to spell or write in complete sentences. They don't do it in informal settings, but they don't necessarily do it for formal settings, either. It's sad.

[(Anonymous)]

I saw the "loose/lose" mistake on one broadsheet newspaper's website the other day.

The article had been up for a couple of days, and no one had caught it or corrected it.

[(Anonymous)]

That's a really common internet error, and one I'd never seen in print before the age of the internet. It's spread.

Some papers are famed for their typos, but there's particular errors that seem like an internet meme in how they've crept everywhere. Lose/loose is a good example.

Nowadays, if I see the word "lose" spelled correctly, I do a double take. It's genuinely got that bad.

Do you think in 50 years that "loose" will be the generally accepted spelling? It's already happened with "strait-laced". Now "straight-laced" is more commonly used instead in my country, even in respected print publications, and that used to be classified as an error.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

The first time I remember noticing the lose/loose error gaining traction was back when I still read Laurell K. Hamilton. Which just goes to show that reading print books isn't a guarantee of mistake-free.

Hers were the only ones I ever remember with that many mistakes though, and I devoured books at the time. And I could see it for a mistake, which is the important part I think. I didn't just think that because this one author used it incorrectly then it was perfectly acceptable for me to do it too. Because I read a wide variety of stuff, I could still tell that her usage was the aberrance.

I was wondering about that when I was typing the comment, honestly. That one day it's going to be so ubiquitous that no one will even think it's a mistake. But it's not as though you're replacing "lose" with a brand new word, so if you start accepting it as okay then "loose" loses (hah!) its meaning too somewhat. Or it becomes a homonym, which only adds another level of complexity onto something a lot of people clearly find too complex as it is.

[(Anonymous)]

My favourite ever internet typo was a Facebook status update which then made the rounds as a screen cap.

Picture the scene: Christmas Eve in a normal suburban home. A young girl can barely contain her joy.

"Grandma is raping the gifts next door! I'm so excited!"

Every year at my house, we still get excited when it's time to start raping the presents.

I couldn't find the exact link, but have a compilation instead: http://postgradproblems.com/yes-people-are-still-raping-presents-on-twitter/

I get your point about the typos in your dearly beloved Laurell K. Hamilton books being balanced out by the correct usage you saw elsewhere. That's what I thought would happen again now. However, it seems like the current generation overwhelmingly reads material on the internet in places with bad spelling (badfic, twitter etc) as opposed to properly edited writing elsewhere. There was a tipping point somewhere that was crossed.

I'm not saying that pre-internet, everyone could spell well. If anything, I have the feeling that literacy has gone up slightly overall, purely because more people write facebook statuses now than ever used to write letters on a regular basis. It's the professional-level writing occupations (journalists, reviewers, technical writers such as for catalogues and manuals) that have suffered a drop in basic spelling ability because they're interacting daily with those who spell wrongly, whereas they didn't before. Democratisation of the internet is a powerful tool in both directions.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, and I bought a video game on ebay last year that came "complete with manuel".

My second favourite ever internet typo. I hope it replaces the real thing.

Cologne/colon doesn't come close, although it's also fun.
http://gawker.com/5903384/why-knowing-the-difference-between-colon-and-cologne-is-kind-of-important