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I agree with BGB's sentiments, but nowadays, we have automated spelling checkers and grammar checkers (e.g. 'Word' or Firefox dictionary plug-ins), so there isn't an excuse anymore.

I was brought up in a European School where I shared my education with pupils from other language streams. As there’d be so much cross-cultural contact, our grasp of our mother tongue languages would acquire features from other languages (needless to say, multi-lingual word play can be fun). When studying science or humanities subjects, our school’s policy was to not care about the spelling as long as what you said was clear and unambiguous. This pragmatic approach is something that I believe in, but as I said, automated checkers are widely available.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s more the content than the spelling that matters, but often (though I have come across many exceptions), poor spelling can be seen as a warning of poor quality content. When it comes to people using ‘txt-spk’ outside of text-messages, it often says that person does not make much effort with anything. However, certain typos (especially in real-time chat) can tell something about the person at the other end. If letters from the above keyboard-row appear, the person has long fingernails. If other adjacent letters appear for no reason, the person has big fingers. Out-of-order letters indicate the hands aren’t properly co-ordinated, and missing letters indicate a worn-out keyboard. Or in the case of people excessively pressing keys on the bottom keyboard-row, it could be a woman with large boobs leaning over the keyboard.

Occasionally, I get eloquent but badly spelled e-mails. This balance between thoughtfulness and bad spelling can shed some light on the author. Also, when being in contact with foreign-language speakers, any mistakes they make when trying to speak or write English can teach me a bit about their own language. It’s an interesting experience reading French people write English with French grammar. Your mind switches to parsing the vocabulary using the rules of one language while parsing the grammar using the rules of another language, and besides, I think that it sounds cute. But people who use Chav-speak when not being ironic are clearly idiots.

As an admirer of Chickenlady’s posts, I for one will be taking any advice she dishes out.


Re: balance of effort: My sentiments exactly.
( mistaspakkaman and the inedible shifting caterpillars, Sat 17 May 2008, 21:19, Reply)