This is quite recent but I’ve been browsing Lemmy a bunch lately and quite often I see extreme grammatical errors.
I’m not talking about like, incorrect stylistic choices between commas and dashes, or an improper use of ellipses or missing commas or incorrect use of apostrophes in its/it’s or in multiple posessive articles or just plain typos or any nitpicky grammar nazi shit like that, but just basic spelling specifically.
It’s one thing when you can’t spell some pretty uncommon words and you’re too lazy to look it up and/or use autocorrect, but it’s a completely different league to misspell very basic words, very recently I saw someone spell “extreme” as “extream” which is just kind of baffling, I actually can’t even imagine how one would make such a mistake?
And it’s not been an isolated thing either, I’ve seen several instances like that lately.
Am I going crazy? Is it just me?
libra00@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
You are going crazy. I’ve been on the internet since like 1992 and have spent many, many years reading forums and playing text-based role playing games, and this is very not new, spelling has always been awful because it’s not a formal medium where that stuff matters to most people. If anything it’s probably gotten better since the advent of smart phones with built in auto-correct.
makyo@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
OP’s browsing habits likely recently changed to a place on the web with more English as a second language users. Those kinds of misspellings are pretty common with people who learned a lot of their English from streaming Youtube and other online shows
Arcane2077@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
It’s the opposite. People learning English as a second language are typically much better spellers. Only a native speaker would misspell extreme that way
lemmyng@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
I’ve always experienced the opposite - native English speakers are horrible at spelling because they don’t have to put any effort into comprehending the language, vs non-native speakers who frequently have to take ESL tests for either academia, work, or immigration, and therefore had more exposure to spelling practice.
libra00@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
My guess is it’s just the frequency illusion, because they’re also super common among Americans who have only ever spoken English from birth. My theory is that these types of misspellings (like ‘itsplain’ instead of ‘explain’) are from folks who don’t read a lot and therefore seem to be guessing on spelling based on what they’ve (mis)heard rather than having seen it on the page/screen enough to notice the correct spelling.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
No they haven’t changed at all. I’ve been using mostly Lemmy as my one and only SM for most of the past year and this is a very new phenomenon to me.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Idk I swear to god it wasn’t this bad like 6 months ago, nevermind 10 years ago. Again, I’m not talking about formality or punctuation but basic grammar like spelling.
libra00@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
What possible cause could there be for lots of people to suddenly start spelling worse? Wait, this isn’t another of those ‘smart phones are making us dumb!’ posts is it? Cause people have said that about pretty much every invention since the printing press. It’s probably just the frequency illusion, where you notice something for no particular reason and then start seeing it everywhere, especially if you’re only noticing changes over the period of a few months. Spelling was every bit as bad in 1995 as it is in 2025. Maybe worse due to the lack of access to spell-checking, auto-correct, online dictionaries, etc, and you can notice it especially in people who don’t read much (which is how you get spellings like ‘itsplain’ instead of ‘explain’, it seems like they’re guessing based on what they’ve (mis)heard instead of seeing it on the page/screen) even long before smart phones were a thing.
starlinguk@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’ve on the Internet for the same amount of time and it’s gotten MUCH worse.
libra00@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I mean everybody has their own experience so I’m not gonna tell you you’re wrong, but that’s not been my experience.
I spent more than 10 years playing text-based roleplaying games (MUSHes) from like ~1993 on, and even people who had multiple scenes a day that were well beyond short story length were frequently just god-awful at spelling. I had a lot of bad habits I picked up from back then that I’ve had to break, some of which (misspelling ‘separate’ as ‘seperate’, f.ex) that still get me sometimes. So at the very least there has been no shortage of awful spelling in the early days of the internet.
By the same token I now spend at least an hour or two a day reading lemmy, reddit, etc and usually several more playing video games where I should’ve been exposed to all this awful typing going on and I have not noticed an increase, much less one worthy of capital letters.
So, I’m not saying it’s impossible, just that as someone who has spent a significant portion of their life reading text on the internet it doesn’t seem likely to me.
scarabic@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yep it’s always been shit.