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Ok so I recently saw this video about grammar and communication on the internet and it points out on when its ok to correct someones grammer and when you're just being a a-hole. Do you agree with the video? what do you think? Post below!!

This post has been edited by neonrain24: 30 December 2011 - 09:04 PM

A nice video, and I can understand why he says all that but I would say people do owe it to each other to type correctly and use the correct grammar. There are the occasional exceptions to the rule but those are few.

Just because you don't have to spell correctly or use correct grammar doesn't mean you shouldn't.

"The tree is theres"

Admittedly not the best example. If he hadn't said before hand "The tree is over there" then I think that it would be hard to know if he meant "The tree is there" or "The tree is theirs"

"then" and "than" mistakes piss me off to no end, but he has a point

idiotic short term thinking from an idiot with a small mind and a bad sense of humour

what if we all start shortening this to ths

you know what it means right??? everyone does! get over it!!

well what if we all start shortening sentences like that to "wt f all of uz start 2 shorten ur words lik ths"

still kinda makes sense but guess what happens if you allow this — words blur together, you lose subtlety of meaning, vocabularies shrink and minds shrink and english becomes even harder to learn and harder to use ("what's the collective version of ths? is there some kind of rule to figure that one out?" no because it was killed off by this youtube idiot)

there's a reason people who love words get bitchy about TXT language and it's not just because they're pedantic snobs.

-- successful english major and failed linguistics major who can tell this guy is an uneducated blathering idiot simply by virtue of his not saying the word "sign" or one of those wasteful derivatives like "signifier" even once.

karo prove your worth and back me up

Holy cow, Suit, I thought this was a thread about some guy bitching about grammar, when did pathetic leetist spelling get thrown in there?
Or were thinking of the whole "snowball rolling down a hill" kind of thing?

This post has been edited by ChewySmokey: 30 December 2011 - 08:50 AM

Grammar is about spelling.

It's clearly evident in two of the examples he uses: "Your a good person" vs "You're a good person". If the former is allowed, then how can I refer to "the good person that you own", without ambiguity? You say the determiner "a" in "Your a" makes the difference? I think many non-English speakers would be left aghast by the confusion this introduces.

"Ur" is essentially the same as allowing "your" to become the sole spelling of this homophone, and if we are to reduce our language to be ruthlessly (and superficially) efficient as this idiot indicates, it is a better way of spelling "your". Do you see what difficulties might follow if I say "ur sheep" or "ur love" or, to introduce another complex problem: "ur fail"?

I guess this all comes to one simple thing: why not? I can think of a few reasons, and yes, simple eloquence is among them. I would defend and explain eloquence if I felt it was worth bringing up, but I don't need too. Only taking a moment to think, I know another, more important reason as to why we speak and use words as we do.

It is said in the video that the purpose of language is to communicate, and I completely agree. The problem is that he based his thinking - as Suit pointed out - in the short term. What happens if we were to begin speaking typing like that? What if we were to simply remove the rules? You're going to end up with a slew of textual dialects - that will inevitably pour over into reality as they always do (verbal language) - and in turn will result in a lack of communication, the very thing he wanted to avoid.

Let's take that abortion of a statement that Suit vomited out:

""wt f all of uz start 2 shorten ur words lik ths""

I barely understood that. The beginning was a mystery to me until the ending of the... clause? I basically had to rely on context clues to even deduce what that meant. Now, that is clearly an extreme case, and since the person in the video's problem is actually the lack of communication, then this defeats itself, simply because it is unintelligible. The problem is statements like these are unavoidable. They happen even now, despite the fact that grammar and spelling is still a generally praised thing - and sometimes a required thing - on the Internet. If you removed that and all pressure not to conform to societies ever so difficult grammar restraints, then it will get worse - much worse. You are going to start mixing in local dialects, creating new, text based dialects, and eventually it will get to the point that you will have language within language - or so to speak. The Internet will become Africa. And nobody wants to be Africa.

Now, what if we were to just apply rules if things got to bad? Make a few restrictions... a few agreements... no problem! Not quite. All you would be doing then is forming a new language. Why form a new language when you could just stick with the old, working one?

Now that I have gotten that out of the way, I will explain my opinion. Yes, there is a time and a place for corrections. Obviously, I'm not going to correct an autistic every second, and I'm not going to bitch at a dyslexic; shit, I won't even give trouble to somebody who at least put a little effort into it. But I WILL correct people who want to be corrected (like me), people who seem to make deliberate mistakes, or people who abuse the privilege of shortening words. Yes, I called it a privilege, and while it may more over be a right, I don't particularly care for the semantics of it since when all is said and done, if that person does indeed abuse his "privilege," their punishment will be my judgment - no matter how disagreed-upon or immoral it may be.

In truth - selfish truth - I am glad people make these mistakes. It is like how gangsters advertise their colors, how dangerous people take effort to look dangerous, or how untrustworthy people come off as shifty: it gives me an opportunity to be prejudiced. Yeah, I fucking said that shit.

This post has been edited by Meowth: 31 December 2011 - 09:54 AM

In the truest sense of irony that I know, neonrain24 misspelt the word 'grammar'.

To the argument, teens are doing to words what Doctors and scientists do to handwriting; Create in-decipherable dialects.

This post has been edited by skmojo: 30 December 2011 - 09:46 AM

Would the spell check on this site accepting "ain't" as a proper word be an example of what you guys are getting at about the English language changing if proper grammar and spelling is not upheld, or is it just a crappy spell checker?

This post has been edited by ChewySmokey: 30 December 2011 - 10:01 AM

Eng;ish is a horrible mess of a language, and to a degree it's not worth fighting for absolute purity of structure. My problem with its evolution is when it is simplified to the point of losing meaning and becoming less colourful. Ain't is fine, it adds more colour.

When England was controlled by the French, the French nobles would eat cow meat, common Englishmen weren't allowed it. In France cow meat was called "beef" and so the nobles were labelled "Beefeaters". Fascinating stuff, "beef" isn't even an English word; Neither is Lamb or pork.
Just a bit of trivia. It's fun to read England's history.

Anyone who's learnt a foreign language can know how 'blunt' or direct they can sound, but I think it's the other way around. I think the English language is the funny one.

"I can't spell good and it's everyone eases fault herp a derp"

skmojo, on 30 December 2011 - 02:42 PM, said:

Then again, probably most English words are of Latin, French or Greek origin.

The most-commonly used words in the English language are almost all of Anglo-Saxon origin though.

I was talking specifically about beef, lamb and pork. English is the only language I know that uses a different word for live cow and food cow, same with lamb and pork.
It's not so much that it's a foreign word, but how it's used. On top of that, it's a noun, so it's not really important. Nouns can be anything.

I see no reason to get mad at him, although I don't totally agree with him. He's not at all endorsing bad grammar and spelling, just saying that pointing out mistakes can be obnoxious. I know for a fact that most of us here don't need people pointing out all of our mistakes in order to keep from typing in stereo-typical internet 1337 speak.
Personally, I don't mind being corrected occasionally, but there are certain times when it just becomes pointless and annoying. Imagine if you posted a couple paragrafs explaining something, and all someone had to say about it was that you misspelled "paragraph"?
So I don't completely agree with him, but I think it's a valid and understandable opinion that I can definitely respect.

This post has been edited by Boringamus: 31 December 2011 - 08:22 AM

You don't get a free ride for deliberately fucking with my language.