No spell check?

[rland]

Hey guys I have been a lurker on the board for some time. However when I read the new updated email today from Hayden, I had to ask this question. Doesn't anyone ever read and or use a spell check any more or read over what they have typed to be posted? While I realize spell check is not an option on this board, I would think most people have some sort of word processor on their PC to use before just posting a message full of misspelled words.

 

Here is Hayden's message:

 

From DC escort Hayden, 11/12/2003

 

Hey I want to let you no I'm out of the biz. I'm dun withe school. I am now working in DC, so I need to have my pic taken down. Thank you to all who helped get me to were I am today. I had a grate time and I am glad to have had the experience. Sadley, it is time to move on.

 

Sincerley'

 

HAYDEN

 

Is this high school or college? Regardless is pathetic. To graduate and still not be able to know the difference between no and know and to spell such simple words as: done, with, where, great, sadly and sincerely is a sad testament to our educational system.

 

Hayden, I sure hope in your new job that you do not have to use language skills unless you use a good spell checker or <gasp> a dictionary.

 

Rick

[AaronScottDC]

>I met "Hayden" once. He is a bright young man, well-spoken

>and thoughtful. I surmise this spelling "shtick" was part of

>his escort persona.

 

Well.... that is certainly an interesting marketing ploy, huh? I guess you shouldn't judge a book by its cover,.... or an escort by his apparent spelling errors. ;-)

 

Aaron Scott DC

http://www.erados.com/AaronScottDC

http://www.male4malescorts.com/reviews/aaronscottdc.html

[guptasa1]

Here's my own opinion on the subject.

 

Different people express themselves different ways.

 

Some people type out a post or e-mail as quickly as they can, just getting their basic message out and not worrying about the little details. This has its definite advantages - it's very quick, and generally you can understand what the person means without any trouble...so what else is required unless you're writing an essay or need to be clearer?

 

I tend to be very thorough and detail-oriented (just my nature), and I do generally (not all the time, but most of the time) re-read each post or e-mail after I type it, sometimes twice or more. This has its advantages too - generally, my post is clear, detailed, and the spelling and such is accurate (though I don't run it through a spell checker unless there's a word I'm really lost on). The downside to this is it takes me FOREVER to make a post - I can be writing a longer one for 10 or 20 minutes...often even more...before I'm satisfied.

 

I'm not willing to say either method is right or better. And I don't think it can be assumed this directly reflects someone's intelligence level. It might reflect personality more. I sometimes find the briefer writing style kinda cute too (in a positive way), but hey - I'm an odd one. :-)

 

Just my personal opinion.

[Guest Mikel]

There has been a study done that the propensity for brevity in electronic mail is making us bad spellers. We read sooo many spelling errors that we begin to allow mistakes to get filtered in my minds.

 

I don't fret over email the way I do over a business correspondence. I am not a spelling bee champion. Still, the given sample was bad!

[ready182]

Re: Rick wrote "Regardless is pathetic"

 

Touchee Rick.

[marc anthony]

I too had the occasion to visit with Hayden on several occasions. He is a thoughtful, well-read young man, and everytime I saw him, he had a book in his hands. He loved to read, and he loved to converse on a variety of subjects with far more breadth than simply how wonderful his ass was (and believe me, it WAS!).

 

By that same token, his AOL profile and all his emails to me were atrociously spelled...

 

I did, however, always understand his message.

 

What is my point? I am not sure. Except to give you the facts... that:

 

1) Hayden is educated and intelligent, and cares about intellectual self-improvement.

2) Hayden is a horrible speller, and obviously doesn't care much about spelling self-improvement.

3) That the above statements made no difference in his outstanding performance of his job as an escort.

4) That it remains to be seen if his new job will require better spelling skills or not.

 

And besides the facts, I just want to express my opinion that I do wish Hayden was a better speller (because indeed he is worse than most), but it in no way has ever lessened my view of him as a beautiful, bright, and delightful young man.

[Rick Munroe]

>I surmise this spelling "shtick" was part of

>his escort persona.

 

Why would anyone want to market themselves as a dumb whore? Sounds really stupid to me.

[AaronScottDC]

>Why would anyone want to market themselves as a dumb whore?

>Sounds really stupid to me.

 

I couldn't possibly imagine anyone wanting to do that! ;-)

 

Aaron Scott DC

http://www.erados.com/AaronScottDC

http://www.male4malescorts.com/reviews/aaronscottdc.html

[Guest ncm2169]

Moral of the story? Some twinks are twinks for a reason, and being a good speller isn't necessarily one of them. :9

[theDCeBOY]

having a phenomenal command of the language hasn't impaired my twinkiness. }(

[taylorky]

the sample given is a bad one .....but so what.

 

i am often criticized on this board by a couple of petty people because of my occasional errors in grammer and or spelling to them i say pfftttt.

 

the only spelling and grammer errors that will ever concern me, will be those made by the people i will someday employ.

after all they will be paid to correct my mistakes,one of the secrets to sucess is employing the anal types no matter how obnoxious and insignificant they may be.

[+ Lucky]

So you will be hiring ETHAN?

[taylorky]

who???????

[kjun]

Do I hear excuses for illiteracy?

 

It is not good to dissuade others from using good grammar. We should all strive to improve ourselves. Writing and speaking well is a good place to start.

 

the Cajun

[+ Charlie]

Why doesn't your command of language include orthography: specifically, upper case letters? (That's a question, by the way, not an accusation.)

[Will]

This, of course, is by no means the first recent thread to address English usage. And, like the others, it's peppered with remarks that seem to be saying that grammar, orthography, and all the rest are fundamentally unimportant, because "communication" is all that matters. But communication -- clear communication -- is what adequate language-use is for.

 

The computer began to ruin (OK: that's my personal opinion) written English a long time ago, spurred mostly by under-educated business people who wanted to sound important but didn't have the chops to do it with grace and elegance. So they cobbled together verbs such as "to impact" rather than "to influence," nouns such as "input" in place of "contribution," and arch redundancies such as "at this point in time" rather than good old "now." To my ear, these and all their snot-nosed linguistic siblings are repulsive and deplorable. However, this is the way living languages develop. To keep things in proportion, I try to remind myself that my maternal grandparents thought it was unspeakably vulgar to say "OK" rather than "all right." What's more, as Virginians, they wouldn't allow their grandchildren -- no matter where they had grown up -- to pronounce "aunt" as "ant" and "tomato" as "tomayto."

 

Let's face it: we live in a culture that fetishizes ignorance and hostile indifference to social norms. Hence woefully under-funded public education, rapper-chic, the kind of writing that Hayden uses online, and a President with an I.Q. of 92.

[rland]

and a President with an I.Q. of 92.

 

You mean his I.Q. is THAT high?

:7

[Will]

I couldn't remember whether it is 91 or 92, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt. As I understand it, earning a bachelor's degree at a reasonably selective college takes and IQ of 125. In this case, of course, the emphasis would be on the verb, "earn." If your last name is Bush, apparently, you don't have to earn a damn thing, especially an A.B. degree from Yale.

[+ deej]

>The computer began to ruin (OK: that's my personal opinion)

>written English a long time ago, spurred mostly by

>under-educated business people who wanted to sound important

>but didn't have the chops to do it with grace and elegance.

>So they cobbled together verbs such as "to impact" rather than

>"to influence," nouns such as "input" in place of

>"contribution," and arch redundancies such as "at this point

>in time" rather than good old "now."

 

Oh, people don't need computers to invent bogus phrases. Many years ago when I was working for a Federal agency that hadn't much bought into the computer craze, I worked on a program dubbed "non-decentralized budgeting". (How about "centralized budgeting"?)

 

But the computer industry, as a whole, does tend to add its share of flotsam to the lexicon. In the Microsoft world, particularly, any noun can be verbed. :9

 

I've also done some editing for a tech journal. I could cut some articles by as much as 50% just by "normalizing" usage. (Replace "at the present time" with "now", etc.) The authors HATED this because the journal paid by the word }( but their articles ended up easier to read and more understandable.

 

Of course, we live in an era where Miriam Webster can be sued over adding McJob to the dictionary. x(

[bluenix]

>This, of course, is by no means the first recent thread to

>address English usage. And, like the others, it's peppered

>with remarks that seem to be saying that grammar, orthography,

>and all the rest are fundamentally unimportant, because

>"communication" is all that matters. But communication --

>clear communication -- is what adequate language-use is for.

>

>The computer began to ruin (OK: that's my personal opinion)

>written English a long time ago, spurred mostly by

>under-educated business people who wanted to sound important

>but didn't have the chops to do it with grace and elegance.

>So they cobbled together verbs such as "to impact" rather than

>"to influence," nouns such as "input" in place of

>"contribution," and arch redundancies such as "at this point

>in time" rather than good old "now." To my ear, these and all

>their snot-nosed linguistic siblings are repulsive and

>deplorable. However, this is the way living languages

>develop. To keep things in proportion, I try to remind myself

>that my maternal grandparents thought it was unspeakably

>vulgar to say "OK" rather than "all right." What's more, as

>Virginians, they wouldn't allow their grandchildren -- no

>matter where they had grown up -- to pronounce "aunt" as "ant"

>and "tomato" as "tomayto."

>

>Let's face it: we live in a culture that fetishizes ignorance

>and hostile indifference to social norms. Hence woefully

>under-funded public education, rapper-chic, the kind of

>writing that Hayden uses online, and a President with an I.Q.

>of 92.

 

Them thar's fightin' words. Kind of.

 

When communication occurs it is generally in spite of the best efforts to the contrary by the parties involved. I'll give you that much. But "under-educated business people who wanted to sound important" have been around at least since the Middle Ages. The computer has nothing to do with it.

 

Only time will tell if the newisms that irk you will persist. But allow me to suggest that some of them aren't as new as you seem to believe. ‘Impact,' for example, has been in use as both a transitive and an intransitive verb since the mid-1700s. It's a back formation from the older adjective ‘impacted' (e.g. an impacted tooth).

 

The irksomeness of the redundancies you cite, I'll give you. My personal least favorite is, "he then proceeded to..." Ugh. God only knows where the motivation for that comes from. The human love of time-based narrative, perhaps, but that sounds dorky.

 

As to fetishizing ignorance, Americans have a longstanding tradition of anti-intellectualism. I think De Tocqueville remarked on it as early as the 1830s. And by the 1920s it had evolved into an urban-rural contest colorfully embodied by the Scopes Monkey Trial, with William Jennings Bryan leading the charge for the conservatives, and Clarence Darrow heading up the Godless opposition. (Darrow lost the case, if memory serves, but won in the larger courtroom of public opinion.)

 

Here's the thing about language. The more you learn, the more interesting and nuanced it gets.

[Will]

I'm glad to know that we share preferences in areas other than sex. Your sympathy with my complaints about language confirms my opinion of your good taste in men.

 

As for "to impact," yes, it can be used as a transitive verb, but I'll have to go to the OED (which I'll do the instant I log off of HooBoy) to check the history of its usage.

 

And as for the long-standing American suspicion of education, I couldn't agree more. However, even though it's been around a long time, our anti-intellectualism is rooted in our British cultural heritage. Many, maybe even most, Americans today don't share that heritage and I've been hoping for the time when the high regard that education enjoys in Europe and East Asia will finally trickle down to the power-brokers, who are still white, Republican, and largely of good old British descent.

 

In my post, I hope I didn't give the impression that I think I'm in a majority here. I don't. But I'm in lots of minorities, including the group composed of men who criminalize themselves, as Woodlawn likes to remind us, every time they hire an escort. Come to think of it, I'm quite proud of my membership in all the minorities that come to mind.

[Will]

As I said I'd do, I went straight to the OED. As I suspected, EVEN WHEN "impact" is a transitive verb, it takes an indirect object and therefore needs to be followed by a preposition such as "on." Here's a paste from the OED, a.v. "impact":

 

1. trans. To press closely into or in something; to fix firmly in; to pack in.

 

1601 HOLLAND Pliny XX. xxi. II. 73 The seed of this hearbe remooveth the tough humours bedded in the stomacke, how hard impacted soever they be. 1709 BLAIR in Phil. Trans. XXVII. 75 These Pyramids, which receive the Hairs, are impacted in the Cutis. a1791 WESLEY Serm. lxxxii. I. 5 Wks. 1811 IX. 417 Impact fire into iron, by hammering it when red hot. 1897 ALLBUTT Syst. Med. III. 835 A stone-like mass..which had become impacted in the lower ilium.

 

2. To stamp or impress (on something). rare.

 

1677 GALE Crt. Gentiles IV. Proem 4 Ideas or notions impacted on the mind. Ibid. 442 Every..Creature has a law impacted or impressed on its Being.

 

3. intr. a. To come forcibly into contact with a (larger) body or surface. Const. various preps.

 

1916 [see IMPACTING ppl. a. below]. 1929 ‘SEAMARK’ Down River vi. 172 Something impacted with a soft thud against Lingard's temple. 1945 Jrnl. Sci. Instrum. XXII. 191 A jet of air issuing from a slot and impacting on a plane surface. 1962 F. I. ORDWAY et al. Basic Astronautics v. 201 The Soviet Lunnaya Raketa was launched early in the afternoon of September 12, 1959 and impacted onto the Moon's surface just after midnight on September 14, Moscow time.

 

b. fig. To have a (pronounced) effect on.

 

1935 W. G. HARDY Father Abraham 370 For there was about them an air of eagerness and of shuddering expectation which impacted on his consciousness and fascinated even while it repelled him. 1956 Oxf. Mag. 8 Nov. 81/1 The Magazine.. is not the place for consideration of national and international events except in so far as they impact on Oxford.

 

4. trans. To cause to impinge or impact on, against, etc.

 

1945 Jrnl. Sci. Instrum. XXII. 187 Experimental results for the efficiency of jets in impacting particles are correlated. 1964 K. STEWART in White & Smith High-Efficiency Air Filtration ii. 57 All impactors make use of the inertia effect which particles exhibit when the gas stream in which they are suspended is constrained to turn abruptly. The particle under suitable conditions cannot follow the stream lines and is impacted against a collecting plate. 1972 J. O. LEDBETTER Air Pollution A. v. 187 An aerosol moving toward an obstacle may impact particles on the obstacle.

 

Hence impacting ppl. a., impinging, colliding.

 

1916 ‘BOYD CABLE’ Action Front 95 No ping and smack of impacting lead hailed about them. 1961 Sci. Amer. Nov. 58/2 The impacting bodies may have been asteroids or comets. 1972 Daily Tel. 17 Apr. 6/8 These particles..cannot be measured or analysed from the Earth's surface. On the Moon, however, the impacting particles leave trails in the detector. 1973 Nature 13 July 68/2 Craters of the size of St Magnus Bay and The Firth would be formed by impacting meteorites of masses about 1 million tons.

[Guest skrubber]

I think good grammar skills and correct spelling is an indication of a persons character. I have forgone several escorts bcause of grossly mispelled words in thier ads. Paying attention to detail carries through to a person's work performance.

[Guest Love Bubble Butt]

>Hey guys I have been a lurker on the board for some time.

 

Hmmm. Of all the issues discussed on this message board, the one that so motivated you to convert from being just a lurker to an actual poster was an escort's spelling mistakes!? You just couldn't stand it anymore and felt compelled to actually "come out" and bring attention to this horrible problem?

[Guest Love Bubble Butt]

>I think good grammar skills and correct spelling is an

>indication of a persons character.

 

Grammar and spelling skills have no bearing on someone's CHARACTER! Granted it might be indicative of their education level, but it is NOT an indication of their character! And for many people (and escorts), English is not their native language.

 

And if what you say is true, then what are we to make of YOUR character given the incorrect grammar in your previous post? (For future reference, you should have stated that it was an indication of a "person's character." Notice the apostrophe to make "persons" possessive?)

 

 

>I have forgone several

>escorts bcause of grossly mispelled words in thier ads. Paying

>attention to detail carries through to a person's work

>performance.

 

And here you've done it again! I recognize that it's just a typo, but "bcause" is actually spelled "because." And what's with "thier" instead of "their"? Yeah, it's obvious you pay a lot of attention to detail.

 

And lastly, why would you forego escorts because of spelling mistakes? I could understand not feeling good about hiring a receptionist for having poor spelling skills, but an escort? Just out of curiosity, if you're at a restaurant and a server comes to your table and uses incorrect grammar while taking your order, do you ask for another server?

 

Get over yourself.