PSA: It's "QUEUE" not "que"

GreenHere

ThoughtRaven wrote: »

GreenHere wrote: »

Anyone else got some nitpicky word nerd stuff to vent about?

Could everyone please stop using the term "strawman" to describe an argument or claim you find weak, exaggerated, or false? This is not even close to what the term means.

No one ever does that, stop making such a strawman argument! GOSH!!


(kidding, people do do that all the time, haha)

cyclonus11

Kwee-Wee

SteveCampsOut

GreenHere wrote: »

Not trying to be the grammar police or anything here, but...

Butt ya are Blanche! Ya are!

SirAndy wrote: »

GreenHere wrote: »

Not trying to be the grammar police or anything here, but...

My personal favorite is when people spell it as cue ...

Pool Cue is Spelled Pool Cue! That's where they're getting that spelling from.

jssriot

GreenHere wrote: »

Anyone else got some nitpicky word nerd stuff to vent about?

Yeah, ok, look. I'm multilingual, I tutored English learners when I was in college and when I'm not teaching (my IRL job) or playing video games, I'm studying another 3 languages I'm not yet fluent in. Here's the thing about people mixing up stuff between the oral and written language they are using: it happens all the time, in every language, but especially in a language like English that has a lot of homophones, loanwords from other languages, a generally confusing orthography and an often unclear boundaries between its different registers of speech. This is in part because the association of oral and written language in the human brain is not as exact as many people assume it is. And doesn't really mean anything to be pedantic about it. You might as well go yell at a cloud.

As a teacher, and in particular, a teacher who teaches English language usage to both native and non-native speakers, I just hate this sort of cringy pedantry because in clearly causal and informal situations, as long as the person is understood, these sorts of mix-ups are perfectly fine. Language, and our capacity to understand it, is amazing like that. I mean, that you know someone means "queue" when they type "que" and "yes" when they type "fdhsks" or whatever proves that, because there is so much more to language comprehension than people spelling things correctly, which is actually an amazingly low priority to getting your point across to another speaker in the real world. Language--real, living language--is always very fluid, flexible and bendy. It's Chaotic Good. It's everything you're taught it's not in your middle school English class and it depressing to see people not progress past that early educational experience, who still think those rules actually matter when language has only one real rule: are you being understood? Language is beautiful like this. Embrace the chaos.

GreenHere

jssriot wrote: »

GreenHere wrote: »

Anyone else got some nitpicky word nerd stuff to vent about?

Yeah, ok, look. I'm multilingual, I tutored English learners when I was in college and when I'm not teaching (my IRL job) or playing video games, I'm studying another 3 languages I'm not yet fluent in. Here's the thing about people mixing up stuff between the oral and written language they are using: it happens all the time, in every language, but especially in a language like English that has a lot of homophones, loanwords from other languages, a generally confusing orthography and an often unclear boundaries between its different registers of speech. This is in part because the association of oral and written language in the human brain is not as exact as many people assume it is. And doesn't really mean anything to be pedantic about it. You might as well go yell at a cloud.

As a teacher, and in particular, a teacher who teaches English language usage to both native and non-native speakers, I just hate this sort of cringy pedantry because in clearly causal and informal situations, as long as the person is understood, these sorts of mix-ups are perfectly fine. Language, and our capacity to understand it, is amazing like that. I mean, that you know someone means "queue" when they type "que" and "yes" when they type "fdhsks" or whatever proves that, because there is so much more to language comprehension than people spelling things correctly, which is actually an amazingly low priority to getting your point across to another speaker in the real world. Language--real, living language--is always very fluid, flexible and bendy. It's Chaotic Good. It's everything you're taught it's not in your middle school English class and it depressing to see people not progress past that early educational experience, who still think those rules actually matter when language has only one real rule: are you being understood? Language is beautiful like this. Embrace the chaos.

I appreciate the thoughtful response!

I'm definitely not smart enough to really feel like I can engage with things quite on that level -- especially as someone who's not really multilingual in any useful capacity beyond helping people find bathrooms or whatever -- but as far as I do understand your point, I can't say I agree. I don't think that you're wrong (or that I'm right), but it seems like too much of an either/or standpoint for me to get onboard with, personally.

Being all uptight about making sure everyone spells everything right at all times, or using the proper grammar as outlined by the Chicago Manual of Style (or whatever authority of choice), et cetera is pretty obviously over-the-top for casual exchanges like internet forums (or just in general, honestly); but I don't think that using the commonly accepted as "correct" words for stuff should just be tossed to the wind. The spelling of words is fairly important fairly often, especially when a transposed or omitted letter or two can turn them into entirely different words. Meanings can be lost fairly easily with just a word or two out of place, in particular when the communicator in question isn't very ... well, good at communicating in the first place! Sometimes you can read the bulk of the sentence and figure it out, or look at what's there to draw out what's missing given the context and whatnot, but the further into these vagaries of communicating we go the further we wade into misunderstandings and just complete breakdown of communication entirely. Gotta have some kind of standards, right? Otherwise we'd all just get onto message boards and go ham on our keyboards, like:
"UUUURRRNNGHH!! Wrog bunga Compani florf queso, am ZoSS an gunna mak an go RGvM? Went under dorweigh and saw too trees fiting into the worlpool loot. It cant doesnt gets no good better to make am worse then before. DUH. Like, who even went to think for these decentions? i'm gunna follow when can do after they undo them to me!"
ya know what I mean? (No, really, do you know what I mean?) Because at best that gibberish above is... open to interpretation. Granted, that's an extreme / exaggerated example... but honestly not by that much; there are legitimately some forum goers that take so little care (or just struggle enough with English) that their posts look frightfully similar to that example. Every now and then I'll read someone's post multiple times and legitimately have no idea what they're talking about. And I think my reading comprehension is at least in the "decent" range.

Which leads to another relevant point -- the harder your outgoing communications are to decipher, the more difficult you're making things on people who struggle to get what others are saying in the first place. (Or just any reader at all, but the ones who struggle in particular.) Whether you're imprecise in your spelling or usage of words, or too long-winded / convoluted in your writing (guilty!), or whatever other barriers you're putting into your own communications, it all contributes to turning the otherwise pleasant(? for lack of a better word) exchange of ideas into a tedious chore for whoever's on the receiving end. Some people's communication is so sloppy and hard to decipher that personally I just don't bother; which I don't want to do to them, because utterly dismissing people's input isn't nice, but I just... can't. And some (many?) people will outright ignore stuff that I write because it's too wordy and long for them to want to be bothered wading through; which I totally get and don't blame them for that at all. So when misspellings and just plain using the wrong word are accepted as "totally fine, so long as I understand you" I can't help but see it as another unnecessary barrier to being clearly and easily understood. Not to mention that not everyone understands things equally, obviously.

Hell, I'm misunderstood fairly often even when I make no spelling or grammar faux pas whatsoever (which is rare, to be fair) just because of word choice/order or the unintentional use of (apparently) local idioms and such. Or reading comprehension issues on the other end of the exchange. Or any other number of things. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯



Besides, my original post was meant more in the spirit of, "If you're like me, you might have gone your entire life until now not even knowing you were making this silly mistake! So here's your heads up!" because I've learned things along the way that I was embarrassed/amused to find out I'd been doing wrong for decades, and I was just totally unaware because no one noticed or brought it up. I used "pedantic" more as a self-deprecating humor kind of thing, mostly just for giggles and snorts. I'm not trying to get petty or enforce correct spellings on anyone; though I am happy if there are people who were previously totally unaware of the "ya/yea/yeah/yay/yo mama" differences that now know better and might use the right word. I don't think that's all that pedantic of an attitude, really.

I still get a chuckle out of the time when I was like mid-20s and someone pointed out to me that "seperate" and "separate" are not separate words, but that I was just being a dumb and misspelling the word when used as a verb. I don't know where I picked up the idea that when you manually separate something it was spelled differently, but I spent like 6 months labeling boxes that needed manual sorting as "SEPERATE" (in BIG bold letters, of course) before someone pointed out my folly. Apparently it was something of a minor joke to everyone in the warehouse for a while before someone called me out on it.


(sorry for the wall of text... being concise isn't my strong suit)

SilverBride

Besides they're, their and there I absolutely hate when people abbreviate everything. I'm not talking about letter abbreviations as much as just cutting off the last half of the words to turn them into something cutsey. (another thing I hate)

As an example, one day at work this girl thought something was cute so she called it "totes adorbs". I gagged when I heard that.

[Deleted User]

Hello everyone,

With this thread not being entirely on the subject of ESO, we're going to go ahead and close it down.

Thank you for understanding.