Quote:
Originally Posted by Don Pensack
But linguistics people have noticed a very strong trend. One of the pleasures of reading posts on a forum frequented by such a large group is seeing the language evolve.
As for misspellings, who would notice "lite" or "nite"?  |
It merely reveals the majority never learnt grammar properly. It's not surprising - in Australia at least, English grammar was taught until some time in the early 1970's when for some reason the education department decided it was all too tedious and dropped it from the curriculum.
I was in the last year formally taught grammar; my sister (2years behind me) and quite a few friends never learned any formal grammar unless they studied a second language such as French or German, in which case (surprise surprise) grammar features very strongly for a few years and you learn how English grammar works.
I think it's disgraceful that the only way to learn English grammar properly is to learn another language. It bloody well should be taught in English classes - it isn't hard.
As for whether it matters - it does. I happen to belong to a rather larger and much older web forum where a some social experiments were conducted by the owner of the forum, notably a period where moderation was rather light and "anything goes" was encouraged, on the basis that some were quite creative in their misuse of the language, and a few were quite witty. The majority unfortunately were simply awful. The site degenerated quickly into ugliness, personal attacks and it reached the point of legal threats.
Finally the owner had little choice if the site was to survive - members were told to shape up or leave, on the basis that membership of the forum was a privilege, not a right. Posts with poor grammar or worse are simply deleted quickly and repeat offenders are sin-binned or banned quickly. That forum is now the largest in Australia. Several other large forums now have zero tolerance.