Hi, My name is Anthony and I was a dumb ass in school.
As anyone who knows me well will tell you, I sucked in school, it took me 30 years to admit it out loud. I was one of those students that should have done well but I just didn't apply myself, lazy is what they would have called it back then, now they would have some acronym to explain it. But in all honesty, I was lazy, I hated school, it was just a social gathering that I felt out of sync with or better yet just not a part of. In the end, I believe I manage to get what I mean across, or at least no ones told me otherwise.
I see a lot of people making simple mistakes, especially in spelling, thats why I reread my posts before posting. Sure I have missed a few stupid mistakes, but I hope I haven't had to many. Seeing others making simple mistakes, spelling, punctuation and grammar, I started thinking about my own posts, so I went over my own posts to do a quick check and edit, I have to admit I did find a few. I'm sure I missed some mistakes and thats why we shouldn't proof our own work and proof readers should get payed well.
The biggest issue with spell check is that it doesn't differentiate between word usage, for example if I were to say, "eye went too the shop and bot a pac of chilly peaces and eight them for diner" my spell check doesn't catch a thing, even though there are many mistakes. Spelling is the one thing I really suck at, but I believe (self delusional?) I have pretty good grammar, I don't think I make too many grammar mistakes.
Grammar puts things into the correct context, simply put, sentences make no sense without the correct grammar. For example. "I see'd the car come and then it hited me on the side of this car". Some of these words didn't pass spellcheck see'd and hited, the reason I use this example is because I hear comments like that all the time over here. One of the biggest errors in grammar here is the use of improper tenses, drives me nuts! Should it matter? I don't know. It just seems to matter to me. The thing is, you can't really correct people about it. They hate you. They look at you like you're some kind of jerk, maybe I am. After all, with all that's going on in the world, does grammar matter?
When I was teaching English, it's ok, I giggle a little every time I say it too, I taught people English as their second, third or one 7 year old student learning her 6th language. When we learn a new language we tend to think in our first language, translate it in our heads and then speak and the reverse when we listen to someone. My example above about being "hitted" by another car is right from when I was teaching. That student was doing very well, except for tenses and verb conjugation because in their languages it's simply different in many languages there is no verb tense, so you run last week and run now but you run next year. It is hard to make examples, I keep correcting them.
In day to day conversations I think grammar is important, but in business correspondence I think our grammar and spelling is very important, spelling something wrong makes us look bad, but bad grammar makes us look uneducated or stupid. I know as soon as I post this there will be people looking it over and finding the mistakes, when you do, let me know. There are many companies over here in Malaysia the could use a good proof reader for their local and international correspondents you would be surprised how bad email can be, I am not only talking about here but everywhere. Everyday I hear people using English very well, if a bit to british, I actually don't notice much anymore.
Another thing thats killing the English language is SMS/TEXT MESSAGING I get messages from people that use l8r, msg me and lol. I'm not talking about a Malaysian company, this was from an English Speaking BRITISH college in Dubai. I don't send text messages as a rule, but over here everyone does, it seems like a lot of work typing in a bunch of text when you could just call and say it in a second and also get your reply immediately. There was a contest for the fastest SMS'er by one of the phone companies and some guy could text at a blistering 160 characters in 41.52 seconds! I'm pretty sure that he was born with a phone in his hands and that that was a world record. I tried to update this blog from my iPhone, it took me an hour to hammer out a couple of sentences and correct a mistake or two, why you ask? I wanted to know if I could. Stupid.
The English language is now used in most countries for international business and international affairs, most people are given the opportunity to learn English in school or University, being able to speak English makes getting a job easier in many cases. But we native speakers of English tend to let let the language down, I don't mean that we don't know the meaning of a bunch of words or that we can't manage to understand a menu, no what I mean is we are letting our language down by simplifying everything. Would you like you doctor to simplify his diagnosis of your cancer? Would you like the airlines to simplify their maintenance and hire only pilots that scored an ok on their english comprehension tests? (English is the international language for air traffic controllers and pilots).
I am not in any way condemning people that learn English as their second language, I applaud them, I wish I hadn't been so lazy and learned at least French, Canada's second language, but I didn't. Here in Malaysia everyone speaks at least 2 languages, most speak at least 3 (Mandarin, Bahasa Malay, and English). I have to say that for the most part the English is just good enough to pass the exams, that is to say not very good, but there are many who speak English as well as I do, my wife for instance speaks english very well altho with a bit of an Australian accent.
There once was a time when we had to know how to spell, use correct grammar and the correct usage of words, but that all changed when spell check was invented in the late 70's. Yep according to Wikipedia:
"The first spell checkers were widely available on mainframe computers in the late 1970s. A group of six linguists from Georgetown University developed the first spell-check system for the IBM corporation.[1] The first spell checkers for personal computers appeared for CP/M and TRS-80 computers in 1980, followed by packages for the IBM PC after it was introduced in 1981."
I copied a poem that passes all my spell checking, but it is pretty obvious that its not correct usage, but entertaining.
Eye have a spelling chequer,
It came with my Pea Sea.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss Steaks I can knot sea.
Eye strike the quays and type a whirred
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am write oar wrong
It tells me straight a weigh.
Eye ran this poem threw it,
Your shore real glad two no.
Its vary polished in its weigh.
My chequer tolled me sew.
A chequer is a bless thing,
It freeze yew lodes of thyme.
It helps me right all stiles of righting,
And aides me when eye rime.
Each frays come posed up on my screen
Eye trussed too bee a joule.
The chequer pours o'er every word
Two cheque sum spelling rule.
The original version of this poem was written by Jerrold H. Zar in 1992. An unsophisticated spell checker will find little or no fault with this poem because it checks words in isolation. A more sophisticated spell checker will make use of a language model to consider the context in which a word occurs.
I'm not perfect and I'm not trying to tell you that I am, I just wanted to show I'm not all together uneducated, just lack drive in educational pursuits.
Cheers
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