Spelling

[Foofoogal]

I ran across this today on a public school district website. No kidding. Reminds me of the Navel Academy booboo.
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1289

92.9%

94.3%

100%

82.2%

17.7%

Academic Performance Index (API)

Graduation Rate

Attendace lol lol

Highly Qualified Teachers

Teachers with Bachelors only

Teachers with Masters degree

 

[davestlouis]

Don't get me started...I was taught all sorts of arcane rules by diocesan nuns, which my public-school-educated kids don't seem to be learning. Further, I used to correct handouts and other things sent home by the school, and send them back. My wife suggested that I cool it, all I was doing was antagonizing the teachers who had control of our kids all day.

If the teachers can't spell, can't use proper punctuation, and can't speak the language properly, how on earth are they supposed to teach children?

And, by the way, the next time one of my kids bellows out "where you at?" to one of their nitwit friends on the phone, I may just kill them. Their friend is not "at" anywhere.

 

[HepKitty]

I admit I'm guilty of prepositions at the ends of my sentences when speaking, but I can't stand them at the ends of sentences in writing. be glad you don't speak German. it's proper auf deutsch to end sentences with prepositions (purposely left lower case)

in HS I had some excellent English teachers. they grilled us on grammar and spelling, and actually came up with intelligent spelling words

what really irritates me is what people put on signs. incorrect punctuation, spelling and grammar mistakes, etc. and they expect to attract business?

 

[Katarina]

lol

 

[Diamondback]

Katarina, have you submitted that to Failblog?

I will admit, I'm rather atypical--I write like most people speak and vice versa, and have had college English profs tell me that while "casual voice" is usually frowned upon it actually helped me make my points. (I even had one prof score a paper with an F-bomb in it a 4.0! It does bear, note, though, that he did ask for a "reaction section" and the particular idiocy in what I was responding to sent me ballistic... I had to wait ten minutes for the blue haze to dissipate before I could see to start writing that part.lol )

What's really disturbing is how poor grammar and usage is, even at the Senior Executive level--I've had some forwarded to me from upper-echeloners at a major defense contractor, and their they're/there/their usage (just to name one example) is a crime against written language!

 

[Mav]

Pet peeve. A result of a CA public school education in the 60's, and parents who were insistent on proper spelling and grammar.
Misspelling sets my teeth on edge. Among other things.

 

[Shawn F.]

You guys think that is bad... Look at the new ebonics class they want to put into schools. Listen to a rap/hip hop radio station. That crap is where all the kids are learning how to speak these days. Do not even get me started on that. :rage:

 

[Tomasso]

I ran across this today on a public school district website.

It starts at the top..............

 

[jamespowers]

Don't get me started...I was taught all sorts of arcane rules by diocesan nuns, which my public-school-educated kids don't seem to be learning. Further, I used to correct handouts and other things sent home by the school, and send them back. My wife suggested that I cool it, all I was doing was antagonizing the teachers who had control of our kids all day.

If the teachers can't spell, can't use proper punctuation, and can't speak the language properly, how on earth are they supposed to teach children?

And, by the way, the next time one of my kids bellows out "where you at?" to one of their nitwit friends on the phone, I may just kill them. Their friend is not "at" anywhere.

I get the same things in the literature that is sent home by my son's school. Suffice it to say that he isn't going to actually attend classes at this public school after preschool. :eusa_doh:

 

[Delthayre]

I be dissin' nobody's grammar (Probably ungrammatical in native use)

I don't fuss over grammar that deviates from my own usage. What's 'proper grammar' is in many ways an arbitrary concept.

I tend to be unexcited by errors in the use of punctuation, but I am often unaccountably irritated by the use of an apostrophe with a plural <s>. I've seen it once or twice in brand names at a market. I've seen, "fedora's," written in the hats section more times than I care to think of.

I think that poor composition is the real villain. Some people seem to pile words together in a terribly haphazard way that I struggle to decode.

 

[Derek Cavin]

...but I am often unaccountably irritated by the use of an apostrophe with a plural <s>. I've seen it once or twice in brand names at a market. I've seen, "fedora's," written in the hats section more times than I care to think of.

My wife's friend is a teacher and that was one of the main things I asked her to focus on with her students.
A professor once told me you can't judge a persons intelligence by their spelling abilities, but it sure does help I thought. Reviewing a resume, spelling is one of the first things I look for.

 

[rcfko]

Zup?

true Dat!

Pieace
lol

That was terrible.lol

Decipher this:
I grow in Hong Kong and was learned badest English form no English speaks teachers.

If it were not for the help I received from my high school ESL teacher, I'd still speak like that.

 

[Puzzicato]

I get very wound up about spelling, grammar and punctuation, but I try not to be too vocal about it, because that is just asking for an even more pernickety person to come and poke holes all over my composition.

 

[Dav]

Sorry if this offends,but Americans complaining about spelling makes me as an Englishman laugh.
Color instead of colour
Aluminum instead of aluminium

 

[Tomasso]

because that is just asking for an even more pernickety person to come and poke holes all over my composition.

Americans complaining about spelling makes me as an Englishman laugh.
Color instead of colour
Aluminum instead of aluminium

That's funny.....

 

[Baron Kurtz]

Yes, many of the English get pretty sniffy about colloquialisms, too.

bk

 

[skyvue]

Sorry if this offends,but Americans complaining about spelling makes me as an Englishman laugh.
Color instead of colour
Aluminum instead of aluminium

And we don't even come close to spelling "football" correctly -- S-O-C-C-E-R.

I mean, really!

 

[Miss Neecerie]

Sorry if this offends,but Americans complaining about spelling makes me as an Englishman laugh.
Color instead of colour
Aluminum instead of aluminium

Ah....but that is an entirely different matter.

The Dialect of American English happens to spell those words that way. British English does not.

Neither is incorrect for their dialect.

Trying to imply one dialect cannot change vs another is rather pointless.

If it was a valid argument, they why don't you still spell like Shakespeare?

or Chaucer?

Languages change, dialects form, those dialects change over time and do not remain precisely as they once were.

fftopic:

P.S.

The history of the word for the shiny metal we make foil and other products out of is as follows:

The earliest citation given in the Oxford English Dictionary for any word used as a name for this element is alumium, which British chemist and inventor Humphry Davy employed in 1808 for the metal he was trying to isolate electrolytically from the mineral alumina. The citation is from the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: "Had I been so fortunate as to have obtained more certain evidences on this subject, and to have procured the metallic substances I was in search of, I should have proposed for them the names of silicium, alumium, zirconium, and glucium."[50][51]

Davy settled on aluminum by the time he published his 1812 book Chemical Philosophy: "This substance appears to contain a peculiar metal, but as yet Aluminum has not been obtained in a perfectly free state, though alloys of it with other metalline substances have been procured sufficiently distinct to indicate the probable nature of alumina."[52] But the same year, an anonymous contributor to the Quarterly Review, a British political-literary journal, in a review of Davy's book, objected to aluminum and proposed the name aluminium, "for so we shall take the liberty of writing the word, in preference to aluminum, which has a less classical sound."[53]



So you might want to check facts before claiming American English is wrong about it...after all, isn't change bad and keeping the original as intended by its discoverer better.

 

[skyvue]

Omitted letters make for funny signs, but honestly, those are something closer to typos, I suspect (something of which we're all guilty at times). I suspect that candidate knows how to spell "district" -- it was just a typo that no one spotted. It's when the author doesn't know how to spell simple words that it's a concern.

There are certain misspellings I see online often that they can't just be typos, though.

"loose" rather than "lose"
"rediculous"
I could go on.

And the use of ellipses in place of periods has gained a certain acceptance online. I don't get that at all, and I sure don't like it.

 

[HepKitty]

I get especially irritated at my own mistakes. in informal stuff I don't worry much but when I'm in a snob mood, I want it perfect

I thought the change in spelling for American English was a deliberate double-middle-fingers gesture to the British to try to separate us as much as possible

Katrina I love that sign!