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?
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 the internet isn’t 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.
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
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
As a non native English speaker I have more difficulty constructing my sentences in ways that make sense in English. It’s a lot harder to put my ideas into text in a coherent way that sounds right in English than it is spelling the words correctly, especially with auto correct and syntax highlighting
Apparently this post is not an example of that issue since your sentence structure in this comment is perfect.
I think you’re overestimating the average quality of English as a second/third language education. The internet continuously becomes more accessible across the globe, which has overlap with lower quality and lower frequency of English lessons. There’s more exposure from speakers that don’t use the same native alphabet as well, so use is not so universal. When speaking is the primary use of language, reading is secondary, and writing is tertiary, mistakes get interesting. It’s not too hard to hear the word “extreme” but visualize the spelling from words like dream, team, cream, or beam, all words I could see being more commonly used than extreme. It’s easier to learn “very” as a modifier to a common adjective.
Source: I work in the US with mixed central/south American-born employees and travel to Mexico often. I see casual US-sourced mistakes, of course, as well as those distinctly from Spanish-speaking writers. My Spanish is just as incorrect. If you can say it out loud and still make sense, I’ll vote for non-native English speakers every time as the cause
American here:
About 20% of Americans are functionally illiterate, 2nd grade or worse reading and writing skills.
The average literacy level of Americans is between 5th and 6th grade… meaning the next 30% have the reading/writing skills of someone who basically only conpleted elementary school.
These are numbers for adults 18 and up, by the way, not kids.
Almost every single person I’ve met who learned English as a second language… can speak it more fluently than most native English speakers I’ve known who grew up in America. More extensive vocabularies, better grammar, better spelling.
And this will get worse.
Covid resulted in a year to two years of remote or missed classes for Gen Alpha, and the Repulicans look poised to finally kill off the public education system in all but the wealthier, solid blue states. Department of Education will be disbanded by the end of the year or earlier if nobody stops it.
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.
Bruh slept through 13 years of English lessons 😂
Lessons are forgotten fast. Ask an adult to do 3 digit multiplication and watch them fumble. Ask about geometry and they’ll ask Google for a calculator. I don’t remember how to do projectile physics. All the same for English. If all a person does is speak the language while writing very simple messages (in comparison to English essays), the memory of complex synthesis is lost fast. If they’re not continuing to do those tasks in life, it’s gone.
I agree. My experience doesn’t really align with the idea that ESL learners are better spellers. English is a conventional language, so it’s not like there is a dictated spelling. Spelling is just a convention.
That would depend on how long they’ve been studying the language for, and their goals/needs in language learning. Someone who needed to learn English and pass formal tests for the sake of employment or immigration will eventually reach that level, but someone who either hasn’t been studying that long or doesn’t consider it a critical priority because they’re just browsing English websites and media for fun might not.
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.
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. I’m also not a native English speaker at all, my mother tongue doesn’t even share the Latin alphabet
Well I guess I don’t know the timing but I wouldn’t be surprised it Lemmy was it - there are a bunch of non-native English speakers here
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 which as you said should be taken care of by autocorrect and I did notice an improvement sometimes around the mid-2010s, but very recently there’s been a noticeable decline, at least in my opinion.
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.
Not saying it is, but accidental, quality degrading, changes to a major/prevalent auto-correct system could result in what OP is claiming. Just to give an example.
I don’t think most people realize how much they rely on auto correct when they are on a phone. When I switched to a new keyboard because I like local hosting my voice recognition the auto correct was initially way worse and my typing speed went down by maybe half.
That’s a fair point, I was just wondering if they had a specific theory as to why it suddenly changed since they were asserting that it had.
No I’m not implying any conclusion with my post. Smartphones actually massively improved grammar on the internet through the joys of autocorrect in my experience
Ah, fair enough. My bad for assuming.
No, I think you does have point, I’ve been sawing that, too.
Look at Mr fancy pants here using punctuation like yer some kinda edumacated person of learneding
I scenes it to scenes it many time. OP is rite is got extream. Happnd all the sudden to
Youse*
Et oak thoug we awl mess that juan.
My spelling and grammar are a lot worse when I type on my phone. I also accidentally a word.
I don’t bother with correcting it since I don’t care.
My mobile spelling has gotten to be garbage because my phone keyboard autocorrects Sometimes and I’ve gotten lazy about Swype/deleting mid-word mistakes. My pen/paper and also physical keyboard spelling remains persnickety
my phone corrects “the” to “Tue”. Thanks phone, exactly what I was going for apparently
Mine autocorrects “the” to “ther” sometimes. Not even a damn word.
My phones autocorrect has been garbage recently. I feel like a few years ago, it was much better at predicting what I meant to type, and I could easily edit on mobile using the suggested corrections. But now it is worse. Even with words or names I use all the time.
Ditto. My older phone (Lineage 17) doesn’t have this problem, compared to my current (Lineage 20)
How long have you had it? it took my current keyboard 3ish months to be as good as gboard which I had been using for years.
I dont have the learn as you type features on, I just use the stock keyboard with stock dictionary
See, I legitimately can’t even tell if you’re trolling or not.
I turned off autocorrect because it was changing valid words into other words. Having an obvious typo is preferable to changing the meaning completely, which happened enough times for me to notice.
I think this is finally being corrected, but for decades kids have been taught “whole word reading” rather than phonics. The basic idea is that instead of learning how to sound out words, they should look at the first letter and guess what they think the word might be based on context/pictures. The proponents of this method claim kids will memorize words as “whole words” and eventually be able to read.
So, they can’t actually read. But they know how to look like they can read.
When you can’t read it’s not enjoyable, so you read less. When you read less you come across fewer words, which you don’t really know how to decode anyway because you were never taught.
Anyway these kids are now adults, and even the ones who are smart still struggle with spelling and reading.
Check out the podcast Sold a Story, really interesting investigation on this topic.
This made me look up “whole word reading”, and it just made me irrationally angry. To be fair, English isn’t my native language and I don’t have a recollection of learning how to read, but “whole word learning” sounds insane. But like… Why would you do that if you are using an alphabet?
Phonics is dogshit and it’s being phased out in favour of whole word reading here.
You should not learn spelling by “sounding out” much of anything, you should learn it through reading text and remembering how words are spelt.
You might want to look at the latest research. Its not favorable after decades of data from “whole word” reading techniques education.
you should learn it through reading text and remembering how words are spelled.
Thats the concept of “whole word”, yes, but in practice it severely limits vocabulary and comprehension apparently. That real world data tells the tale.
I’ll have a look, but idk I was taught whole word in two languages and I can write a lot better than I can speak in at least 1.3 of them.
Did you downvote me because I pointed out the latest research doesn’t agree with your position?
I didn’t downvote you at all
My apologies. The downvote was on my post in under 15 seconds after I posted it. I had assumed the only one that would see it would be the person alerted to it. I guess Lemmy is growing up there are downvoters waiting to pounce instantly! We’re graduating to the big leagues now!
At average apparent text sizes, you only see ~4 letters clearly at a time, so it’s often enough that you can’t read a whole word at once. From there, there’s so many prefixes, suffixes, conjugations, compounds, and portmanteaus that it doesn’t make sense to just try to memorize the dictionary. What happens when you’re reading a flamboyant author that has tons of theasaraus usage and you come across words you’ve never heard in your life? You use context as best you can, but if there’s familiar roots in the word, you have a better chance of understanding it.
Also
spelt
That is a grain spelled “spelt”
You can memorize the patterns of each word and eventually you just understand language. Is that not how it’s meant to work?
Lemmy seems to have a pretty high number of non-native English speakers, particularly Germans and other Europeans. I think this leads to people making seemingly simple grammar mistakes while also appearing to know English well.
Plus, American schools have completely gone to shit, so I’m sure that doesn’t help either.
This was going to my answer as well. While spelling on the internet is pretty bad, English isn’t the primary language of many people on Lemmy.
Increased reliance on touch screen devices with dodgy autocorrect probably accounts for a good chunk of it.
I know it is not uncommon for me to have to go back and edit something I wrote from my phone after I submit it because I didn’t see the autocorrect mistake before hitting send.
It’s not just spelling, even online people don’t even bother using grammar. They literally stuff 4 different sentences in one line without using commas or periods. It’s maddening, honestly.
I’ve noticed mine got worse for some reason in the last five years. So many words that I’ve had no issue spelling I’ve lost confidence in spelling and need to look it up. Happened around COVID for me, not sure why.
Brain damage from stress lol. I find myself occasionally typing “there” instead of “their” and have to catch myself. I always reread what I type before sending so I fix it before sending, but I never made this mistake before. Somehow, over the years, probably from stress of various kinds (and this dates back to pre-COVID), I began to process language aurally and less visually, so if it sounds close enough and I’m not really thinking about what I’m typing, I’ll use the wrong word.
I’ve never typed “payed” before, though, and I see that across Reddit increasingly. It’s just crazy that that and “could/would of” have exploded over recent years.
Sounds? You pronounce words as you type?
Does your inner monologue not say what you are typing in your head as you type?
There are people who don’t have an inner monologue, they just think in abstraction. I have a friend who is like this. She tried to explain it to me and I just couldn’t even comprehend what a paradigm shift it is from how I thought all brains at a basic level worked.
It’s like when I learned that some people actually see images when they “picture something in your mind’s eye.” Had no idea that was literal.
That’s crazy to me. I constantly am talking to myself. Like a full on dialog with different “perspectives” and all that jazz.
I think of words’ pronunciation as I type them, with no literal audio/particular human voice or vocal range. How do you envision words upon/right before typing?
I think that it’s mostly just Lemmy being less dominated by native English speakers. Many of those mistakes that seem baffling “make sense” in some other languages
I no phone gudz mane.
No, but really typing on a glass slab sucks. The software sucks ass too and seemingly no OEM is interested in improving it or trying something new.
Android’s spellchecker sucks at handling 2 languages at once so I gotta turn it off and rely on the keyboard’s auto correct.
Both FUTO and Heliboard insist on not correcting obvious misspellings or change correct words to nonexistent ones.I’m convinced we’ve gotten the maximum we can out of the touchscreen QWERTY format. EIther we get a new Blackberry KeyOne style device or we get some stenography-like software innovation that converts vibes to words, I dunno.
I am pretty sure android is getting worse at correcting input and also changes words after the fact as you type, coupled with phones are awful to type on, results in this fucking mess we get now days.
It also seems to be on the rise in online publications. Both spelling errors and synonym/grammar issues have increased significantly over the last year, most significantly in the last 3-4 months.
I make more spelling mistakes when autocorrect is on than when it’s off (and every little update to the os seems to re-enable it 😬) because it constantly wants to change words that were spelled correctly, to a different word that doesn’t fit the context.
If you’re talking about my messages, it’s because I swipe too fast and don’t check the message 9 times before posting. All sorts of weird nonsense slips through every day, some of which I edit later.
If you’re talking about how native English speakers spell, you’ll find all sorts of weird mistakes that seem to stem from the fact that English is pure chaos, and navigating this mess is about as easy as programming with a magnetized needle and a hard disk platter. The way I see it, mispronouncing every word in a consistent manner helps me remember how they are written. The trick is to use a consistent spelling system of another language to form an auditory memory of the spelling.
So in my mind, every word comes with three entries: what the word means, how it’s pronounced and how it’s written. Memorizing a combination of letters is hard, but memorizing a funny sound that you can later decrypt back to a sequence of letters is easier. That connection has to be 100% consistent, which is exactly what English can’t offer, but many other languages come pretty close.
If your first language happens to have a fairly consistent spelling system, you can totally use it to memorize how English words are spelled. Native English speakers are obviously completely screwed, and that’s why spelling bees are a thing and why this post exists.
How is swipe writing supposed to work? I’ve never seen it in action by someone IRL, and whenever I’ve tried it myself, it seemed to be way too much hassle vs just typing shit and using predicts to auto complete.
What I like to call “glide texting” is when (on a phone) you put your finger on the first letter and drag your finger to the next letter and the next and so on without lifting your finger until you reach the last letter. Letters that are repeated (like in too) are just treated as one letter for this. Your phone will then “guess” what word could be represented by “what you just drew” and give you some options above the keyboard (3 for my phone) for alternatives in case things were guessed wrong. This requires your keyboard to support that feature (and the basic Android keyboard does support it). On earlier phones, the SwiftKey keyboard was used to do such things (that company was later on purchased by Microsoft by the way).
There are two issues I want to highlight with regards to glide texting.
First is where several words can be represented by one “glide text”. I feel (can’t prove) that the phone does use the context of your sentence to assist with word selection. However, you sometimes have to be annoyed and type out words letter by letter to get things entered.
The second issue is that your phone learns from you and from the “intelligent population”. If you type in a wrong spelling (perhaps by not entering in the last letter) then your phone “learns” that word and starts to use it when glide texting. Second is when a person glide texts incorrectly (for “hello”, instead of swiping over HELO they swipe over GWKO or BELO or something like that) and then that person taps the “Hello” entry for what that glide should mean. Now the phone starts thinking glide texts for a specific word (from anyone in the world) must mean some completely different word because the majority of people seem to indicate that.
Still, glide texting is usually a faster way to enter text on the phone. That being said, issues can be quite interesting when they do appear.
Swipe typing is the cursive of smartphones. I love it, it’s so much faster than regular typing (for me at least). I didn’t realize how uncommon it is until several people commented on me using it.
What? I didn’t know this was rare. This thing is brilliant. Why would it be uncommon.
I’m with ya. I was shocked to learn that there are people who don’t use it. Keyboard typing with your thumbs feels like Blackberry energy.
Idk i ditnt notise anyting unujual
