I sure hope we're not subjected to lots of misspellings in the future. One of my pet peeves word wise is when someone writes peeked or peaked when they really mean piqued. I can't figure out why that one bugs me so much. (I'm going to re-read this a hundred times before I hit post.)

Seen in Essex a few years ago:

Yard Sale 2-Day: Rain Are Shine"

A relative living in small-town North Carolina was once handed a business card by a detective from the local PD that bore the word "Invistigation". Me, I've always been stymied by the fried-chicken joint on the southwest corner of Charles and North Avenue with the neon sign "Mec & Cheese" in its window.

I can't believe you read all of those King/Meyer posts. The spelling was so horrendous and the grammar convoluted that I quit after the second day. If I were Stephanie Meyer, I might look at who my fans are and - at the very least - cringe.

I break out in hives (almost) when people who profess to love words treat them like garbage. Readers of King or Meyer or [fill in the blank] should be absorbing more than a story. They should be soaking up some sentence structure . . . and yeah, spelling.

Don't they care?

"The grate art in writing well, iz tew kno when tew stop." Josh Billings

I'm right there with Eve - I had to quit after a while b/c all the misspelling were giving me such a headache! (hmm, I wonder ... does b/c bother everyone? I use it all the time online ...)

AMEN, BROTHER. AMEN

WP -- I know that sign! Forgot all about it but it drives me crazy when I'm waiting at the North Ave. light.
bryan -- maybe that sign was related to the M.R. Ducks phenomenon?
And Heather, I'm OK with b/c, though I sometimes I have to look up the more obscure abbreviations such as wdymbt (what do you mean by that?).

Could it be that just the fans of these books can't spel? (Apologies to the wide world of horror and vampire fans).

I'm an English teacher--it is hardly just the fans of these books who cannot spell. Although I am constantly correcting spelling, I sometimes have to pick my battles. I do tell students that while it is okay to use "text speak" for instant messages and phone texts, it is not okay to do so on a formal English submission. We have had to contend with the holistic approach to assessing work, which is both good and bad.

The advent of the Internet has paved the way for more and more of us to have a say, rapid-fire, without proofing or much thought, so is it the medium or the messenger? Letters of yore (and I do mean yore) indicate a wide variety of spellings. Are we just moving backwards?

Makes me wish we had a military draft. Sweet Jeebus! I don't know what's more depressing, the spelling or the reinforcement of a stereotype?

In elementary school, I was always the best speller, so I'm totally biased (and also totally right). I also collect dictionaries (slang, jargon, foreign languages, etc.), so spelling is important.

I wonder how many of these same people have a beef against immigrants? I'd gladly trade these philistines who can't spell (or pick something decent to read) with an industrious immigrant (legal or otherwise). The accusations of "Speak English! This is America, pal!" lose their punch when the nativist idiot can't spell. Those people -- and people who consider Ayn Rand as "literature" -- should be first on the list for deportation to Antarctica.
New Rule: No dissing foreigners unless you first learn how to spell your own language.

As a millennial, and therefore slightly responsible:
English is a living language. It's going to change whether its speakers like it or not. When we create new ways of communicating (like texting or instant messaging), our language changes to better suit those methods of communication. In these new methods, eloquent, correct speech is usually not important--a quick reply is.
Honestly, I'm more bothered by changes in grammar.

but rly, i agree

Today, I received a business letter from a college with the the opening line, "Sorry fore the delay in my response." And that was not the only mistake.

I totally agree. I cannot believe the spelling I see everywhere and it looks like correct spelling is not so important nowadays and no one is embarassed about not being able to spell. I am typing this ever so slowly in order to avoid spelling mistakes because that would be embarassing (for me at least). I bought a book recently where each and every single word "to" was spelt as "too". That irritated me so much that I could not really get into the book.I mean really aren't there people who read through these things before books get published? The book was written as first hand experience and I just could not sympathise (sympathize) with this victim.

My feelings are basically the opposite of yours: texting/counter-culture spellings grate on my nerves, while normal spelling errors don't bother me so much. The former irritates me because it involves a conscious decision to misspell a word. I used to be more judgmental toward the latter, being a naturally good speller (my mother still has my collection of medals from UIL spelling--so many hours of my life spent learning words and terms like "Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease"); however, I've met many very intelligent individuals over the years who simply cannot spell. My brilliant husband, despite his efforts over the years, cannot spell. So I'm less of a fusspot about spelling than I used to be.

I guess my question would be, is spelling really worse these days? Or is it that we're just reading other people's casual writing more (thanks to the internet), and thus seeing that an awful lot of folks out there can't spell?

There is a place for both... but as long as it is tolerated by the general public, it will not go away.

Spell check cannot spell check everything... to vs too. That tells me a human did not proofread that book. The same with many newspaper and magazine articles. People were removed and the computer was left to do the job... and it fails.

If people try to use their idea of 'in' spelling on a resume at any reputable business they will be in trouble. The same with a research paper or technical paper, so why is it missing such things as 'SHOOL ZONE' signs etc? The latter actually happened in my county!!

Does anyone else think about the first generation of kids who learn to "text" before they actually learn to read and write the English language?

I agree about English being a living language. And slang, region, and venue have a lot to do with it. But after 8 years of a President who could have been functionally retarded, is it too much to ask to raise the bar a little? Or at least pick it up off the ground? Right now our standards are so low a baby could back-flip over them.

When I was on a school trip to Germany, the "gymnasium" students (roughly equivalent to high school) were reading Portrait of the Artist by James Joyce.

Granted, you don't have a lot of space (or time) to speak in a chatroom or Twitter, but I'd hate to see this bleed over into English essays and more formalized writing. Would you read a Village Voice article if it were written with lolz and spelling errors? There's no excuse for misspellings, living language or not. That's a pathetic cop-out excuse. (I don't see why you Canucks and Britishers are holding on to those redundant "u"s in color and neighbor?)

I think quickness and accuracy are important in this media-saturated age. Both complement each other. Look at the US, we were so quick to hit back after 9/11, we invaded the wrong country (accidentally on purpose). Our school systems should cultivate quick, smart minds, not fall for the "living language" egalitarian hoo-ha. Grammar and spelling are important. And I think it is a give and take with consensus negotiated between educators and "the street."

Plus, if a person can't spell common words, they should be laughed at and publicly shamed.

"if a person can't spell common words, they should be laughed at and publicly shamed."

I feel the same way. So, when I notice I've created some transposition on LT posts, I am totally scandalized.

Spelling? Spelling? Didn't he have a hot daughter? Torry, or Tori, or Torie, or something?

Did a lot of TV shows, as I remember.

wot? as any fule kno, spelling is all in the mind.

I should never have read this. I will treat (?) you to a few examples from my 11th grade English classes that I might eventually put into a book entitled That Was a Big Missed Ape.
1. I like Macdonalds b/c they have a dollar mean you.
2. He's cloths was expense.
3. Then Queen Elizabeth climbed down from her pedal stool and spoke personally to the troops.

("1" was from a regular class; "2" from and honors class; and "3" from an A.P. class. Read and weep.)

As for spelling on the internet, I've always been that kid who writes with perfect spelling and grammar on the internet. I just think it's important to respect the language that so dutifully allows you to express yourself. While it's understandable (and understandably annoying) that a commenter might write informally with all sorts of shortcuts on somebody's blog, what's worse is that this comes from giving spelling little importance. Almost all browsers have spell-checkers these days and the shortcuts don't actually shorten that much when you speed-type anyways. It's a cultural issue - many do not consider spelling to be important and thus don't bother to correct misspellings even when they're perfectly obvious.

And sometimes, though rarely, people just accidentally make mistakes. We're only human, after all.

Heather, I've used b/c for years when taking notes on meetings or telephone conversations. Pairs up well w/

kswolff - I'm not sure that a military draft would solve anything. If these young people are truly as dumb and poorly educated as they "sound", then the military wouldn't take them anyway. The Army does have standards, you know!

English could use some rather radical reform to modernize its orthography, and perhaps a period of chaos and lack of standardization could bring that about.

Yeah. My pet peeves are "your" and "you're" and "there", "their", and "they're". Somebody recently wrote about a "doggy-dog" world. I work at a local college and it's frightening what people are putting down on paper these days. If you think papars and essays are bad, you ought to look at some of our job applications!

I'm sure it was more of a typo than a spelling error, but my favorite was the sign in Dundalk a few years ago that advertised a "Pubic Auction".

My laugh of the week was a user on IMDB who confused flagellants with flatulents...

I teach English as well, frequently to students in my own age bracket, and was shocked that I had to use class time to explain WHY "LOLs" and "OMGs" were inappropriate for formal papers. They're allowed to use internet-speak in their free-form journal writing - which I've informally designated the "First Amendment" project since almost anything goes - but in anything beyond that it's banned.

Other English teachers have started declaring now "the end of the language as we know it," but I think that's a little cynical. If something such as a language gets deconstructed (which one can argue internet-speak is a form of), it invariably undergoes a reconstruction later on. We can sort of see this as a period of transition and comparative chaos before it cycles back to something more comfortable that pleases all parties.

I don't think we have a choice.

I will confess that often when I post on DorothyL or another list that I somtimes forget to spell check ... Or while I'm spell checking, I change some of the text and do some of the same dumb things that Dave decries.

Frankly, I'm more bent by the OMGs and the LOLs and the lack of capitalizatin than I am of the occasional misspelled word.

But as I said, we have no choice. I would bet, though, that most of the misspellings were coming from the Stephanie Meyers camp. Clearly, her target is a younger audience.

It's a whole new generatation, Dave. Spelling will probably not be taught after a while, just as we have combined geography, history. and civics under undsocial studies. And I understand that many schools are dropping social studies.

(When I graduated high school and could not spell at all, I remembered that to pass spelling, you only had to get seven of ten correct.)

Be nice if we could do something about it, but probably not.

My concern is so many seem to think spelling doesn't matter. Yes, it does, if we are to accurately convey our meanings. And not just spellings, but meanings of homonyms, too, and differences in meaning, like 'imply' as opposed to 'infer'. People worry so much about getting their point across (not 'there' or 'they're') but don't take the time to make their words and spelling correct, to help toward that end.

I blame the age of instant communication. People mistake quick for good, which is just as bad in communication as it can be in food.

From a John Lewis public sign in Milton Keynes, UK.: "Now open everyday of the week."

I'm a spelling geek, and I constantly notice typos in published books, but I try not to correct people the way I used to, as I grew tired of the violent reactions. I have to admit, I do luv teh lol cats tho. Someone translated the whole Bible into lol speak - where do they get the time?

What amazes me about misspellings on the internet is that modern browsers all come with spell-check features. Whenever I misspell a word I get a dotted red line underneath and I go back and fix it. Of course, this doesn't help with word substitutions, but it is surprising how many basic errors are left when a quick right-click would produce the correct spelling.

The social issue is whether a stigma will continue to be attached to spelling and grammar errors. Unless I have reason to believe that the writer is not a native English speaker, I instantly discount writing that is filled with errors. It indicates to me a certain lack of seriousness. If this stigma diminishes enough we may evolve our way back to the days before standard dictionaries when people spelled however they pleased.

I think the problem here is not so much bad spelling as a limited vocabulary, or more accurately ignorant misuse of many words.

Most of us learn to spell (and write) through reading. The student who spoke of the pedal stool did a good job of puzzling through the spelling of a word he/she may never have seen, only heard. At least they used it in a proper context. Every person here and in the world at large has added emphasis through repetition or reinforcement ("spoke personally to the troops") and in this day and age people stand on pedestals and speak without an audience present. Maybe QE couldn't do that, but we all can and do, now. Had this student had a sufficient introduction to World History? Did he/she understand that if QE spoke to her troops it had to be personally?

We are returning to an oral society, fewer and fewer people are reading. My grandparents didn't get the news without reading it somewhere. My parents learned to read before KDKA came on the air. I, on the other hand grew up with television, although I did not have television at all from ages 8 - 12, and the local radio station broadcast in Spanish during the evenings, so I was forced to read for entertainment.

Today there are fewer reasons to read and today's youth need only be proficient enough to read the instructions to WOW. Some will read on their own because they understand that reading can be a more thorough and immersive experience than television or radio or the computer, but they are relatively few and I suspect they are either in circumstances that limit their access to broadcast media or they are wired differently than most.

I tell young people who wish to start a family to sell or otherwise dispose of their television sets until their children are old enough to decide whether they want television or not. Television is an intellectual killer, not just a wasteland, a killer. No child less than 16 should be subjected to television. Without those four years of very limited exposure to radio and no television at all, I would not be engaged in a discussion of reading.

I'm beginning to believe reading is like walking, there is a time for it and if that time passes in front of the television the door will close and another potential reader will be lost. Unless we are willing to belly up to the TV and turn it off reading will become a niche activity engaged in by the snobbishly elite.

Many of the misspellings are not caught because people are relying on spell-check. Most of the examples cited here ("steak through the heart", "write to his opinion", "sorry fore the delay", "massive Christian burial", "pedal stools") will not be flagged by a spell-check because, although the word(s) wanted are spelled wrongly, the results are actual words.

Yes, And it seems publishers are just putting scripts through spellcheckers instead of proofing them. I recently read Ken Follet's World Without End. I picked up several errors of precisely this sort: their for there, weather for whether, that sort of thing.

"New Rule: No dissing foreigners unless you first learn how to spell your own language."

Love this! I work with many brilliant people who speak another language as their first, and I am ever impressed with their understanding and use of English - particularly when so many native English speakers completely drop the ball linguistically.

I, too, will read this (and anything else I post, e-mail or even text) five times before posting - even then, I'm willing to bet I'll miss something!

And I do agree that spelling is important. I sometimes literally cringe when I see something misspelled in any formal publication and even in blog responses. In fact, my husband and I often share these examples with one another as a way of sharing the burden of being forced to endure such ineptitude (not really - but they are often good for a laugh!). I also see that there are some understandable shortcuts taken in some of our more "instant" forms of communication. These shortcuts do not necessarily bother me. What does cause some concern is the gap in understanding between when that language is appropriate and when it is not (i.e., formal essays, articles, job applications - ouch!). I just hope employers continue to hold firm expectations - and take the time to explain to applicants why this is a problem.

Similarly, there are certainly parts of our language construction that are becoming, for lack of a better word, obsolete (not ending a sentence with a preposition, for example). I certainly hope, however, that spelling correctly will experience a resurgence, as I believe our effective communication in the future depends on it.

It is refreshing to know there are others out there (besides English teachers - bless you!) who find the state of our spelling/grammar painful at times!

I have always had a gift for spelling and grammar (for the most part). I'm currently a technical writer/editor so spelling words correctly are a part of my job.

I think that mis-spellings can make the writer seem less credible.

Melanie - I'm a pretty good speller, but what I find really painful is the state of English spelling itself. It's incredibly chaotic, which must contribute (to some degree) to illiteracy.

I hope to see some reform and modernization of our orthography some day, though I have no idea how this would happen. I do know that, since there is no English language academy to control this (a fact of which I am in fact glad), such a reform would have to be started by people whose spelling would, at first, be labeled as incorrect.

If you are hopeful of any effort to reform, standardize and simplify English orthography, you should have a look at David Wolman's Righting the Mother Tongue, which describes how all such efforts over the past two or three centuries have been utter failures. Then you will understand more fully what you are up against.

John - indeed, I have no expectations of such a thing. :)

I guess what I was getting at was this: since there's no central language authority to impose such a reform, the only way such a change *could* occur is if the current standard pretty much broke down and became irrelevant. If there's ever going to be a more rational writing system for English, there's going to be a period where most people view "the reformers" as simply wrong and uneducated. (I put the phrase in quotation marks because the nonstandard spellers will not likely view themselves as having any program, other than spelling things in a way that makes intuitive sense to them.)

I suffer terribly from FFS (Fat Finger Syndrome) and don't always have the desire or feel the need to fix my problems. I occasionally use a word or phrase whose spelling/meaning I'm not sure of and have been called on it. My biggest problem is punctuation. Sometimes I feel like a comma is necessary for proper phraseology when in reality it just slows down the reading.

I don't think any of us are perfect all the time. The quality of writing we do here will be, for the most part, taken from our default thinking/writing skills with a bare minimum of revision and rewriting.

We each have our bugaboos. Mine is the misuse/nonuse of the articles "a" and "an". "An" is used before words that begin with a vowel sound. Not a vowel, a vowel sound. A car is not "a 8 cylinder". It may be "a 6 cylinder" but it is "an 8 cylinder". This just drives me nuts. I see it more and more as if we no longer teach the difference. On the other hand, my wife has a thing about misuse of the apostrophe, something I try to follow, but am not always correct and often have to think about.

My bugaboo is the use of "may" for "might". It's a lost cause, I'm afraid, as are other nice crisp distinctions such as "that" and "which", "less" and "fewer", and "shall and "will". Losing these distinctions weakens the language. It's now not enough top say "I will do it" for emphasis; I have to say "I really, really will do it," or something equally clumsy.

I also hate homonym confusion (e.g., they're/their/there) but I have stopped caring as much because it would have driven me insane.

Here's an interesting comment posted by Frank Moorman on the You Don't Say blog:
Discussions in this vein often lead me to bring up the quote attributed to Andrew Jackson the first time I came across it in Daniel Boorstin's The Discoverers that he had no respect for any man who could spell a word only one way. I have since heard it attributed to Abraham Lincoln, but suspect that people who don't really know who said something clever pick Lincoln because he probably would have if he had thought of it.

Or your old pal at the Sun H.L. Mencken. He couldda said it, too. Although I doubt it. My guess is he would not have had nearly so much respect for a man who spelt anything more than one way, come to think of it.

I think H.L. would have been most distressed at the way text-talk strips the language bare of its complexity and subtlety. I'm sure he could have held is own in snarkiness -- and probably would have had his own talk show on radio or TV. But he would not have lived by abbreviations alone.

The funny thing is, in the printed article in the paper today, "than" is spelled 'then". He who is without sin.........

We all make mistakes occasionally, but in my job accuracy is paramount. I have a couple of relatives I think are slightly dyslexic, and they have a very tough time with homonyms.

I have to say that when I read a job application and spot a typo or a misused word, it goes into the reject pile!

What bothers me is when someone spells like an idiot and then gets shocked when you treat them as such. If you're communicating solely in text, that's how you're going to be judged. Why be so surprised about it?

This is especially true for emails. Instant message conversations are real time and mistakes can be understood, but if you have the time for composition such as an email or blog/message board post you should at least read over it once or twice..

And don't get me started on "there/their/they're" "your/you're" etc...

(that said, a prize to the person who finds the inevitable required-by-irony-law spelling error in my post that is critical of people who make spelling errors...)

Ever since I saw "Stephan King is a gerk" in that article within a comment, I've been calling my husband that to be funny. "Stop being a gerk." We've gotten much entertainment out of it but I also fear for the future.

Hrm!

I'm in two minds about this...

Part of my job involves copywriting, and I'm fluent in written and spoken English. I can, and do, write formally where appropriate but...

*hangs head*

If you talk to me on IM, or online in games (WoW/GW, etc), I tend to use lolcats speek. *shame* You see, the thing about lolcatz and leetspeek is... it's evil... EVIL!!!!

You start doing it for fun / out of a sense of irony, or a combination of the two...

Then you realise ZOMGWTFBBQ! this stuff is ADDICTIVE! It's FUN to append Zs to everything under the sun. And smileys too! XD

I think the issue isn't so much... is there too much leetspeek and lolcats and bad splellink as...

...can these people spell in the first place? Can they write formal, presentable English when required to? If they can, lolcatz away imo!

But then I'm obviously biased. *cackle*

As a high school teacher, I can say that spelling is dead, or soon will be. I have had students misspell "and" (en), "the" (de), and "I" (aye). These were not ESL students, but kids who were born in the United States. When I give vocabulary quizzes, I make them spell the words first. They think I am so very mean. If they only knew :).

When completing cryptic crosswords, I actually insert punctuation and accents. I am a grammar queen and I am unrepentant!

Seriously, what I find most infuriating are not those people who (for whatever reason) cannot spell or punctuate correctly - it's the people who are proud and boastful about their poor literacy skills. I have no idea why this is becoming so prevalent, but it is beginning almost to be a badge of honour, especially (dare I say it?) amongst Young People. Hmmph. (I'm not becoming a Grumpy Old Woman, by the way. I was BORN a Grumpy Old Woman ...!)

English developed into a "borrowing" language of great flexibility, resulting in an enormous and varied vocabulary.