Responce - spelling rant

[joe carrow]

I didn't want to post this in an active thread because I didn't want to personally attack anybody. I don't believe that I'm the world's best speller or anything, but this has been annoying me for a while now.

Maybe it's bothering me more because Firefox now has dynamic spell-check built into the browser, or maybe it's just the time spent editing my girlfriend's thesis- but I can't hold me tongue any longer.

It's spelled R-E-S-P-O-N-S-E, response.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/responce

Somebody *please* correct me if this is the UK flavour of the word- I think everyone is just spelling it wrong.

[Conrad Hoffman]

IMO, one of the things that makes this forum so great is world wide participation. English isn't every ones first language, and I tend to cut people a lot of slack on spelling here. In the photography forums nobody seems to be able to spell aperture, and it drives me nuts. OTOH, I notice that programmers seem to be more accurate in spelling in their forums. I can't spell that well, but use the Google toolbar spellchecker on most posts.

[joe carrow]

I'm really sorry if that was insensitive to all of the folks typing English as their second language- I applaud their participation in this forum, and appreciate their knowledge and the experience they bring from all parts of the world and all areas of expertise.

I mostly meant it as a rant against folks in the US who otherwise seem to be native speakers. It's a rant, and I don't expect anything to come of it.

[Netlist]

I know of two members, EC8010 and GRollins – there may be a lot more – being very attentive to spelling mistakes. I love it when they occasionally correct me, pointing me to the grammatically correct way of writing.
When I sporadically visit Dutch forums, I recognize your frustration. Myself, being a non-native English speaker, try to adopt a correct spelling although I’m well aware that I keep struggling with words and sentences, often deleting and rewriting complete posts before I hit the submit button. It’s time consuming but a nice exercise.
I can imagine that many people post in a rush to get their message online and don’t bother about typos and I admit that some native speakers should try harder.
Such is the fast world of today but we shouldn’t be sour about it as languages grow and evaluate constantly over time, just like our hobby.

/Hugo – Hoping for a nice response.

[Shoog]

Some people just can't spell (its called dyslexia) and sometimes the spellchecking just confuses. I often find myself posting a message and then editing the mistakes straight after. If you have word blindness the change of format can often reveal things which were previously hidden.
I object to people confusing spelling with talent/ability/intelligence as there is often little relationship (though sometimes there might be)..

Shoog

[speaker]

Originally posted by Netlist
Hugo – Hoping for a nice response.

First & foremost, anyone whose native tongue is not English should be commended for their efforts to converse with it!

What I have seen many times is that on their own they will adopt the proper forms without prompting.



Second, if you were born to English, there is little excuse for responce, prolly, recieve, seen for scene, site for sight, by for buy, etc. once you have been made aware of the proper form.

Edit -

Of course dyslexia gets a pass as noted above.

[Ed LaFontaine]

I received a response from an architect yesterday that included "sub post" when he meant "supposed". He's in Atlanta and English is his first language. I feel your pain.

as languages grow and evaluate

...but in the spirit of helping Netlist better understand English...did you mean to use "evolve"?...evolution...evaluate...I've done worse

[Netlist]

evolve, develop, change, progress. Yes.

I guess evoluate would have been good were it not a ‘Frenglish’ word: évolution - évoluer – and here’s the typo : evaluate.

/Hugo

[EC8010]

Originally posted by speaker
Second, if you were born to English, there is little excuse for responce, prolly, recieve, seen for scene, site for sight, by for buy, etc. once you have been made aware of the proper form.

Native English-speakers have a duty to write grammatically correct English in order that those for whom English is their second language can understand them. One year, I had two dyslexic final year project students and and second marked a third dyslexic student. Dyslexia meant that it wasn't merely that their spelling was questionable but that their words in the written wrong order arrived. Genuine dyslexia is excusable; lazy spelling isn't.

[Christer]

I am not a native speaker and I do not claim to master english, but I do often get irritated by spelling errors of surprisingly simple and common words from supposedly native speakers. However, it has struck me that very often they use a spelling that is phonetically close to the intended word. It seems those people somehow reverse engineer the spelling from the pronounciation of the word.
I have spotted similar tendencies in swedish, so it is probably not just a phenomenon in english.

Then we have all these confusing cases where we have the same word in both languages, but with a slight difference in spelling:
adress in swedish - address in english
parallell in swedish - parallel in english

or was it the other way around?