LainTrainApr 14, 2025

Am I going crazy, or has people's spelling gotten awful lately?

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/42180752

Am I going crazy, or has people's spelling gotten awful lately? - Divisions by zero

This is quite recent but I’ve been browsing Lemmy a bunch lately and quite often I see extreme grammatical errors. I’m not talking about like, incorrect stylistic choices between commas and dashes, or an improper use of ellipses or missing commas or incorrect use of apostrophes in its/it’s or in multiple posessive articles or just plain typos or any nitpicky grammar nazi shit like that, but just basic spelling specifically. It’s one thing when you can’t spell some pretty uncommon words and you’re too lazy to look it up and/or use autocorrect, but it’s a completely different league to misspell very basic words, very recently I saw someone spell “extreme” as “extream” which is just kind of baffling, I actually can’t even imagine how one would make such a mistake? And it’s not been an isolated thing either, I’ve seen several instances like that lately. Am I going crazy? Is it just me?

Show threadLibra00Apr 14, 2025
You are going crazy. I’ve been on the internet since like 1992 and have spent many, many years reading forums and playing text-based role playing games, and this is very not new, spelling has always been awful because it’s not a formal medium where that stuff matters to most people. If anything it’s probably gotten better since the advent of smart phones with built in auto-correct.
Show threadKühlschrankApr 14, 2025
OP’s browsing habits likely recently changed to a place on the web with more English as a second language users. Those kinds of misspellings are pretty common with people who learned a lot of their English from streaming Youtube and other online shows
Show threadLainTrainApr 14, 2025
No they haven’t changed at all. I’ve been using mostly Lemmy as my one and only SM for most of the past year and this is a very new phenomenon to me. I’m also not a native English speaker at all, my mother tongue doesn’t even share the Latin alphabet
Show threadKühlschrank
Well I guess I don’t know the timing but I wouldn’t be surprised it Lemmy was it - there are a bunch of non-native English speakers here
Apr 14, 2025 at 6:22pmWeb
Show threadLainTrainApr 16, 2025

Are you fucking dense? I just told you that I’m also ESL, I don’t make such typos, it’s no excuse at all and makes it make not an iota more sense than saying the pigs are flying hence people’s spelling fell off a fucking cliff.

Lemmy is def not it, I moved here a year or more ago, the spelling has gotten very bad very recently and I only use this platform pretty much and this is where I’ve seen it the most by far.