Great New Year's Resolution: Speak Proper English
Language is the key to ideas. When people practice sloppy language, what they are really doing is admitting their own disordered thought patterns. Using proper language, spelling, diction, and vocabulary is the sign of someone who has taken the time to discipline their thoughts. It also reminds me of a scene from "Akeela and the Bee" where the spelling coach instructs young Akeela on the necessity for proper use of grammar.
It definitely changes my degree of respect for someone when they do not properly use the language.
My usage is flawed, too, but I make an effort to eliminate the most obvious errrors.
Is it too much of an effort to click on it and have the program correct it?
I'd use different words all the time just to piss it off!
I compose most of my writing in Microsoft Word, where I use AutoCorrect extensively, not so much to make corrections, but to minimize the amount that I must type to produce a desired result. Few Word users know to set (and document) their own replacements. Much of what I write goes in looking like text message shortcuts that transform automatically into real content. Though available for long words, the big gain comes from short words that I use far more frequently.
Fe, wn I tp, te chh tt look like sm absurd msg tx im become wt wuda reqd more time aa effort.
Or with my cistomized AutoCorrect:
For example, when I type, the characters that look like some absurd message text immediately become what would have required more time and effort.
I do have the feeling that its harder to understand news articles in the last few years. I have postulated that they must be written by robots according to rules some editor sets out. I find that they go from what one person says to what others say- back and forth and I get lost as to who said what. Causes me to reread carefully and take a lot of time for that.
I also notice that news articles on google news are excessively long and seem to repeat stuff over and over to fill up the required word count. Annoying.
I have nearly totally stopped watching and listening to news on radio and TV- It seems that no matter what someone does, the TV/Radio people take exception to it in order to create controversy. If Melania wears a dress of one color, they complain some other color would have been more appropriate . Boring.
I am not a writer, obviously, and tend to pay more attention to what I am trying to communicate, then how short a time it takes me to accomplish that. Maybe its just I am getting old...
My tricks include programmable keyboards, programmable button boxes, AutoCorrect, power mousing, and voice input.
As to the news, yes, it's getting worse. Too many Breaking News items about a bear in a tree or some cute dogs or that Nancy Pelousy and Upchuck Schumer still hate Trump.
Then we have news consisting of last night's comments by the station's newscaster/teleprompter reader. And finally, providing only a few minutes for a guest to make a complicated point before, "Sorry, we're out of time—we have to show you this cute cat picture, and then tell you that Batshit Nancy has declared walls to be immoral."
But we have nothing to fear from Asian bots as a quick stroll at http://www.Engrish.com demonstrates. I just went through the "Menu" items, clicking Previous Week's Engrish until I had stop from the pain of laughing so hard.
A lot of words I use come up underlined but Autocorrect can't do anything with them.
How do you set your own correction?
wn > when
bc > because
env > environment
exp > experience
Ribbon versions:
Click the File tab, click Options. In the Word Options dialog box, click Proofing, and then click AutoCorrect Options.
The rest as above.
If you web-search, you can find macros for storing, exporting, and importing your customized AutoCorrect entries. They go into a Word document table where you can edit them in bulk.
Tips: Use non-words for the replace term, otherwise you might get unwanted results from ordinary words.
apx > approximately
doi > Declaration of Independence
cmp > computer
but not com for computer, or you'll end up with bad web addresses in documents, such as www.galtsgulchonline.computer
I set separate entries for singular and plural pairs so I can display only a single entry in my cheat sheet. I set such entries to a color instead of black to indicate a pair. To me, from a typing perspective, the natural addition to create a plural is to repeat the last letter because I already had a finger on the right key. So:
mgt > management (in black in my cheat sheet)
cg > change (in dark red in my cheat sheet to show that I created two entries):
cg > change
cgg > changes
You can also throw in transpositions that Microsoft may not cover, such as:
nad > and
or words that are hard to remember which is right:
consistant > consistent
seperate > separate
For words that get underlined, that's a different issue.
If you live in Conshohocken Pennsylvania, MS Office will not recognize the town name.
You can edit the custom dictionary (or create multiple custom dictionaries) under Proofing.
Perform a web-search to find out where your version of Office keeps custom.dic and open it in Notepad. Or create it if it does not already exist. It's just a list of words that will be "known" as correctly spelled.
In case anyone is going to read this and isn't familiar with how AutoCorrect in MS Office handles capitalization (and would want to know), the replacement takes it cue from the "shortcut" word. If I define: cns to be replaced by constitution, Cns gets replaced with Constitution, and CNS gets replaced with CONSTITUTION.
I am driven to exasperation daily by the "like" crowd.
And if you think it is only the "average people", whoever they are, use it you are mistaken. I heard/saw a number of "celebrities" doing the same thing, which obviously gives us an insight of their level of intellect, if we can use the word.
One of the (main) reasons for this is the culture of videos and audios where people do not learn writing or spelling.
An example from my area when a guy in the classroom presented a paper on "guerilla warfare", misspelling the word for "gorilla" throughout the paper.
I don't think it is going to get better. Schools are preoccupied by PC curriculum and pay little attention to essential things. We have to do the homework ourselves.
I switch radio or TV stations when a speaker presents the third “ya’ know” in a minute or two, or at the first instance of two of them consecutively placed: “It shows my ya’ know, ya’ know, creativity.”
For in-person conversationalists who drastically overdo “ya know,” I’ll strike back with “no, I don’t know” at clang response speed to display by example how irritating their embolalia is.
Question: does that make someone who hedges when speaking falsehoods an embolaliar? =D
Unbearable!
Still can't believe an elected official could be that ignorant, but then again I'm confronted by people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and I am pointedly reminded that yes, yes there really are more of them. Then comes the sobering thought: and they vote!
While "ya know" has been around for decades (I remember hearing it back in the 70s) the "like" phenomenon is more current. It can't be older than 2 decades the most, unless I am mistaken.
The latter one has infected people from Hollywood (I hear "celebrities" pepper their sentences with it which reflects on their single digit IQ) to the teenage generation where you hear nothing else.
Here's a poem I wrote while stuck in traffic in February 2006.
Modern Verse
–Or–
Poetry Joins the English Language Going to Hell in a Handbasket
He goes, I think, “Ya wanna drink?”
“Like watcha got?” “I got this rot.”
Ya know like um, fer sher that’s dumb,
And then ya know, it’s like they go,
“Want Coke and rum?” So, she goes, “Um
“Like sher ya dope, but like I hope
That Coke’s diet.”
He goes quiet.
The "uneducated" younger generation is really a pain to listen to. They start each sentence with "...and I was like", then "he was like".
It ruins my day every time I hear it. You can't correct them b/c that is considered "disrespectful".
It's only going to get worse, as "smart" phones allow the use of extensive acronym speech (ROTFLMAO) and emojis in texting. You can now dictate your text and have the responses read back to you audibly, so even the illiterate can communicate thanks to technology. Sad.
Then they get elected to con-gress and really show their intelligence.
Please let Tina and myself know if you plan to butcher English.
Oh, and phuck your Oxford comma!
[drawl]
"What we have here is a failure to communicate."
[/drawl]
"Sloppy spelling and incorrect homonyms in a purely written forum send out the same silent messages that soiled clothing would when addressing an audience."
"At Camp Beau Soleil, the campers are forced to learn French by the brutal camp counselor, Le Capitain, but a camper named Luke is determined to escape." April 19, 1980
I agree that sometimes poor grammar can make a point - but that also illustrates my point exactly: that the choice of poor grammar, etc. came from an ordered thought pattern and conveyed a specific idea.
Or do we get too pedantic? That's something up with which I will not put."
You can answer "yes" or "no", agreeing or disagreeing with the presenter. IN case of the latter you are expected to elaborate your own view.
This is what I think it means.
My favorite peeve is "at the end of the day" closing a sentence. The presenter is trying to emphasize his view by stating what's going to happen if certain things are done.
How does he know what will happen by day's end? Of course no one is going to check it so the guy gets away with it, playing the "wise".