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Subject:Re: Friday Fun: What Pet Peeve makes you puke? From:"David Loveless" <daveloveless -at- gmail -dot- com> To:"Ron Hearn" <RHearn -at- cucbc -dot- com> Date:Fri, 21 Apr 2006 13:04:22 -0600
Ron asked:
> A curiosity more than a peeve I have is the "homonym phenomenon" found
> in emails and IMs (but hopefully not our docs). That's when people use
> "your" for "you're", "there" for "their" etc. Just wondering why people
> do that? Is it that people are in a hurry that they don't think about
> what they're (got that one) typing or is it a lack of spelling and/or
> typing skills? Any thoughts?
To be honest, I don't know for sure. However, I've always believed
that those types of mistakes are simple errors that aren't corrected.
When I right IMs, e-mails, or other similar things I often will not
take the time to make sure that affect/effect, your/you're,
there/their/they're and other such items are correct because I believe
my reader will understand. In school, a linguistic professor took
great pains to prove that the human mind often slips to the simplest
and easiest way of communicating. I believe that that also can be
applied here. I personally think that the boundary between spoken and
written English is becoming more and more blurred. That would explain
the to/two/too and your/you're problems since in spoken English the
distinguishing characteristics or context, not spelling.
Having said that, though, I place the blame on illiteracy. And that
isn't to say that people can't read, but rather that they don't. I
imagine that if we were to take a poll of this list, the average
person here would have easily read at least several thousand pages of
something so far this year. I did some quick calculations, and I'm
pushing roughly 10,000 pages of non-work related reading easily. And
this does not include reading newspapers, magazines, websites,
e-mails, etc. How many pages would say the average high schooler has
read so far? If you're my brother (senior in high school), maybe 10.
Fifteen if you count the first few pages to his XBox and PS2.
Just a thought.
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