Our future, ladies and gentlemen, is looking bleak. It’s not simply because of rampant statism but also because of rampant stupidity.
I make plenty of grammatical mistakes on this site. When somebody is gracious enough to point them out to me I thanks them and correct the mistake(s) they alerted me to. Apparently this isn’t the case with most people:
Scientists have found that people who constantly get bothered by grammatical errors online have “less agreeable” personalities than those who just let them slide.
And those friends who are super-sensitive to typos on your Facebook page? Psychological testing reveals they’re generally less open, and are also more likely to be judging you for your mistakes than everyone else. In other words, they’re exactly who you thought they were. That sounds pretty obvious, but this is actually the first time researchers have been able to show that a person’s personality traits can actually determine how they respond to typos and grammatical errors, and it could teach us a lot about how people communicate (or miscommunicate) online.
As somebody who prides himself on constantly improving I appreciate when people point out my mistakes so that I can correct them. It seems most people don’t have an interest in improving their grammar and instead get angry that somebody would dare point out their error.
I’d really like to find a spelling or grammar error in this post to point out, but I’m fluent enough with English to spot them.
There is a difference between “I think you are missing a ‘not’ in that last sentence” and “It’s ‘They’re’ not ‘There’ moron.”
You seem pretty good on the worst ones that make me grumpy & whiney:
You’re/your/yore
Loose/lose
Too/to/2/two
There/Their/They’re
Reticle/Reticule
You’ve got a couple little ones in this post, but since I never screw up (haha… right) I’ll leave yours alone.
At least I’m avoiding the most common ones!
I think the tone of the correction reveals a lot about the person making the comment. If I like the author and the column, I try to begin with a positive statement, then, “Oh, I noticed …”