Trials/trails... For the love of Julianos, please get it right!

THWIP71 · November 2017

You can deal with all that crap on your screen, and you're upset over the switching of 2 letters??

Jarryzzt · November 2017

1. Sports broadcasts have, for roughly the past year by my count, included advertisements for some sort of computer software that automatically corrects spelling and grammar in one's emails as one types them. Examples include some solidly middle class "assistant vice president" of something sending his first mass email at his new job, etc.

If this isn't a statement about where we, as a society, are potentially heading viz. spelling and grammar, never mind punctuation and heaven forbid actual content, then I do not know what is. Especially as things like "spell check" and "underscoring possible spelling or grammatical mistakes" actually exist, and have for a while, which implies an entirely new tier of laziness has been solidly attained.

The point is that complaining about "trial" and "trail", or "principal" and "principle", et cetera, on an Internet forum of all places, used to be at best quaint and hopelessly old-fashioned. Roughly a decade ago, that is. At present, one simply throws up one's hands at the mere notion.

2. That trial took five hours and nineteen minutes? Or am I reading that wrong? Do all trials take that long - because if that is the case, then I shall liberally pat myself on the back for having avoided that content to date...

ProfessorKittyhawk · November 2017

My peeve is how people constantly say que instead of queue. Every time I see them say que I think they're trying to speak Spanish.

MjolnirVilkas · November 2017

For the love of all that is sacred...

Chufu · November 2017

Can't understand why so many people have problems with "trails" or "trials", in my Language we call it

"Prüfung".

Much better

Vanthras79 · November 2017

IronCrystal wrote: »

DID SOMEONE SAY TRAILS

Is this a meme thread now? Trails is to trials, what the natch potes are to the patch notes.

resdayn00 · November 2017

TheNorthernDragon wrote: »

resdayn00 wrote: »

TheNorthernDragon wrote: »

So learning to write the language is a separate skill, and spellcheck doesn't pick up these written mistakes caused by English homophones. What about "payed?"

Learning to write a language is indeed different from learning to speak a language. I don't know about your own native language, but in mine, Hungarian, people do spelling mistakes ALL THE TIME. And spell check doesn't help as much as you'd expect it to.

You'd be surprised, but 'payed' is actually a correct English word, although it's not the same as paid, it's the past tense of a special meaning of the verb 'to pay' used in nautical environments. This can explain why spell checking doesn't help with this word. Also 'paid' is irregular, so non-native speakers unsurprisingly make that mistake.

@resdayn00...Well, you did teach me, a native English speaker, that there is a proper usage for "payed," but I'll be damned before I believe that there are a lot of sailors here! Sorry, not buying that excuse. I still think it's because there are a lot of ignorant, lazy Americans (my fellow countrymen) around here!

You're right, likely there aren't many sailors around here, but that's not the point. My suspicion is that some learners of English language, especially beginners, might think that the past tense of 'pay' is 'payed', because that would be the correct form if it was a regular verb. And since 'payed' is part of the vocabulary (as an obsolete, rarely used word), it might be possible that spell checking doesn't highlight the word as incorrect. I'm not 100% sure, this is just my hypothesis as to why people make that spelling mistake online.

Mazbt · November 2017

nvm

Iselin · November 2017

It's so confusing because I always eat trail mix in trials.

Iselin · November 2017

ProfessorKittyhawk wrote: »

My peeve is how people constantly say que instead of queue. Every time I see them say que I think they're trying to speak Spanish.

We should start a change.org petition to make it just a capital Q... "Q ball", "what's up next in the Q", "Man that's a long Q for the bathroom"... works for me.