Spelling Common Words?

Through the years of participating on various forums, I have noticed a certain pattern of misspellings that seem to be quite common. Lose vs loose, their vs there, effect vs affect, whether vs weather, moron vs maroon, etc. Lately, there has been a total misuse of the word "boarder" vs 'border" and it has been bugging the heck out of me! I subscribe to cooking.com and just today, they sent me an recipe email and one of the recipes was titled: "South of the Boarder
Grilled Corn".

One has to wonder about a website that makes such an obvious blunder!

Those kinds of spelling errors are rare here, usually coming as a typo. Sometime I can think "there" and type "their" and it bugs me if it's on a site that it can't be edited.

ATS is an international site and English is a second language for many of the European participants, so for that reason there is a kind of prohibition against rapping on anyone's spelling. Most of those, however, are not ESL folks and it is difficult wading through every possible misuse being used in multiples.

Moron and maroon are acceptable though. Bugs Bunny was famous for saying, "What a maroon!" It is kind of a popular euphemism.

Spelling and usage laziness is rather grating and all too common. This site is amazing for all its proper spellers.

Maybe it is more than a bit "anal" on my part but it really bugs me when I see the wrong application of a spelling. Granted some people on these various forums have English as a second language and I can accept that. But, certain people should know better!

Please, don't get me started on apostrophe's!

It's its own problem, the apostrophe. Maybe that is the Yahoogroups allure, software that goes nutz over apostrophes. Like English doesn't have contractions or possessives?

Then there are the Canucks who use flavour instead of flavor. Favour instead of favor. Colour instead of color. Spell check goes ballistic over that.

Apostrophes are a pain.

I think that texting is contributing to bad spelling, and that gradually kids could become illiterate.

Time to consult Fowlers Modern English Usage before continuing on this thread.

I personally have no problems with Cancuck or Brit spellings and some of them are kind of fun to use once in a while. It may be the "Twitter Generation" but the diminishing of spelling skills has been going on for quite some time. After sending a complaint to cooking.com, I did receive an answer today. Now here is a real shocker - they took no responsibility for the recipe title since they are submitted by outside sources. Funny thing is that if one clicked on the link to go to the actual recipe - it was spelled correctly. It is that damned "turnip truck" that I just fell off of!

LOL Neil. Quoting from your last post, "After sending a complain to cooking.com...." It happens to the best of us!

Jim

I have no idea what you are talking about, Jim!

Quote :

Last edited by cheenagringo on Tue Aug 02, 2011 9:15 pm; edited 1 time in total

I love it when they post an audit trail on edits!! But nice try, Neil.

Jim

Can't put anything over on Jim!

"Looser" was for a long time the preferred spelling of "loser" on the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree Forum. It has apparently died out now.

Since "looser" was most often heard online as a hurled epithet I was satisfied to let it stand for itself. In that sense I thought it rather humorous. Makes "scents" to me.

The one that torques me and is gaining a lot of traction is the use of "of" in place of "have" when spelling-out a phrase instead of using the popular spoken contraction. Example - "I would of done it that way."