[lg policy] On the internet, nobody knows you can't spell

[Dennis Baron]

There's a new post on the Web of Language:

On the internet, nobody knows you can't spell

The English Spelling Society has released a report blaming the internet for what it sees as the current epidemic of bad spelling: "The increasing use of variant spellings . . . has been brought about by people typing at speed in chatrooms and on social networking sites where the general attitude is that there isn't a need to correct typos or conform to spelling rules."

Many people have come to the same conclusion, despite the fact that, by popular demand, almost all of our digital devices come equipped with unforgiving spell-checkers that mark every mistake with bright red lynes lines.

This is hardly the first time that the 'net has been unjustly blamed for bad English. Studies emerge with depressing regularity charging that texting, chatting, and email lead us to abandon the civilizing rules of Standard English—whatever they may be—and replace them with monosyllables, abbreviations, and emoticons that are barely a step away from brutish barks and growls.

. . . 

read the rest of this post on the Web of Language:  http://bit.ly/weblan
____________________
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English                    
University of Illinois 
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801                                               

office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321

http://www.illinois.edu/goto/debaron

read the Web of Language:
http://www.illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage








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