The spread of misspelling
Concerning Time’s support for misspelling, David A. writes:
I have been watching this trend for years. Contempt for grammatical standards, punctuation, capitalization, and correct spelling—it is all part of the calculated dumbing down of American culture. Mike Royko encountered people who could not spell “magazine” or “Chicago.”
Over the past eight years I have seen:
—A newsletter issued by the St. Louis Public Library with the word “Odessey.”
—Sign on office door in white neighborhood: “This office will be closed in Osbervence of Presidents’s Day.”
—Signs in white neighborhoods:
“elp Wanted”; “Enterance”; “Unted We Stand”; “For Renet.”
—Newspaper death notice: A dear departed woman has “joined the angles.”
Signs in black neighborhoods:
—”No Loitring”; “Braclets”; “Bazzar.”
—On a storefront catering to blacks: “Watch’s….Purfume….Colonge.”
Can any of your older readers imagine Sears, Woolworth’s, or the May Company posting signs like those on their stores?
“It is as though America has become a gigantic dolt-manufacturing machine. We now see common words misspelled on CNN, for example, or on labels in supermarkets…”—Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture (Norton, 2000), p. 38.
It is not surprising that Marxist enemies of America promote such efforts to dumb down the American people. What is remarkable—and appalling—is the sheeplike acquiescence with which many Americans surrender to those efforts.
Hannon writes:
Your most recent entry on this subject recalls one of my favorite misspellings, by civic workers, that was on TV some years back. They managed to misspell Ohio on a prominent road sign, if you can believe it (I think it was rendered “Oiho”). But there is something to be said about distinguishing careless mistakes, which we all make, from an inability to spell. What is tolerated by the bosses of those who commit the errors is the real problem. If they fail to uphold standards then J. Q. Public gradually forgets there ever was a standard, or becomes annoyed at those who remind them.
They say tension holds everything together. So what happens to a society when such low-level tension starts to degrade?
James P. writes:
“It is not surprising that Marxist enemies of America promote such efforts to dumb down the American people. What is remarkable—and appalling—is the sheeplike acquiescence with which many Americans surrender to those efforts.”
I’m not necessarily surprised that Americans acquiesce to the efforts to dumb them down. It is hard work to be knowledgeable and well-educated. To know the basic rules of grammar and spelling requires repeated, monotonous drill, and the students hate doing such drills just as much as the teachers hate teaching them (this is what they now scorn as “rote memorization”). People are naturally going to take the path of least resistance if they are allowed to do so—we see this all the time when students change their majors from difficult math and science fields to far easier liberal arts fields.
There is also the phenomenon of being “so dumb you don’t know how dumb you are.” A lot of Americans simply don’t know that their grammar and spelling are atrocious—one sees ample evidence of this on the Internet—and thus see no need to correct it. Unfortunately their so-called teachers are also increasingly too ignorant to correct their students, or too lazy to insist on high standards of grammar and spelling.
Lydia McGrew writes:
While your readers are getting started on the murder of the English language on signs over the past few years, let’s see if any of them have noticed this additional aspect: People do not know what scare quotes are for. I once saw an advertisement for a bank that offered free checking, and the word “free” was in scare quotes. Whoever made the sign had no idea that this punctuation cast doubt on whether the checking was actually free.
I had a shirt printed for my father with a picture of my daughters and asked for the caption “Grandpa’s girls” under the picture. They put the photo caption in quotation marks on the shirt, an ignorant and ambiguous use of quotation marks that could be taken to mean that they are not really Grandpa’s girls.
I’ll just throw one more misspelling into the mix: On a printed sign for a realtor in front of a house, I saw the phrase “Real estate and developement.” I thought, “Why didn’t the printers catch it.” But apparently printers are just hired now to print, not to catch obvious misspellings.
LA replies:
Now that readers’ attention is focused on the problem of misspelling, may I take advantage of the opportunity to complain about the extremely common misspelling today, even among highly intelligent people, of “lose” (with voiced “s”) as “loose” (with sibilant “s”). You might “loose” the dogs of war on your foes, but under no circumstances can you “loose” a war.
August 22
Roger G. writes:
I admit I’m not sure about these points, but I think, in a recent post, you should have used a colon instead of a comma, and the subjunctive rather than the active.
Accordingly,
“Thus Iraq fails to meet a defining test of freedom, that its government is able independently to provide security and other essential services.”
possibly should have been
——Thus Iraq fails to meet a defining test of freedom: that its government be able independently to provide security and other essential services.——
To refresh your memory, earlier this year you yelled at me for not sufficiently identifying my emails, then you very courteously apologized.
LA replies:
Ironically I originally used the subjunctive “be,” and then changed it to “is.” Somehow the indicative felt more appropriate there than the subjunctive. But I’d have to think further why I think that.
I think it’s because the determination that a country is “free” is dependent on an actually existing condition. If the country is actually able to perform such and such functions, then it is “free,” if it isn’t, then it isn’t. So we’re not talking about a possibility, supposition, expectation, hope, or desire. We’re talking about a fact. If such and such fact obtains, then country X is “free.” Is it does not obtain, then country X is not “free.” So it seems to me that the subjunctive is not needed here. Though I’m not sure I’m right on that.
Clark Coleman writes:
Several years ago, I mentioned that the famed Kaplan program for SAT preparation on the PC had a warning message pop up that said something like: “Are you sure you want to quit this test? You will loose your scores.” I noticed the discussion in the latest misspelling thread http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/011223.html and remembered that you wanted a JPEG of this window to post.
I have not been able to find it tonight, as there are so many options in the program, so many practice tests and evaluation tests and ways to prematurely quit a test. I will keep searching as time permits. I did notice tonight, on a reading comprehension test, that one of the passages said that some animal “caught site of” something it wanted to eat.
Of course, we really must cut people some slack on these spellings. You have to admit that the word “lose” is quite difficult, consisting as it does of one syllable and four letters. How demanding we must be to expect someone to spell this correctly after only 13 years of education at taxpayers’ expense, along with their years of college education.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 21, 2008 10:31 AM | Send