So you have a pet peeve about bad spelling in chat?

I tend to differentiate between abbreviations on one hand and leetspeak or IM jargon on the other. I have no major issue with "ppl" or "brb" but "cuz" or "wat" are enough to make me quit a team or refuse the invite. The letter U and the number 2 are not words.

Why it gets under my skin is this: It's not just what such usage says about the speaker, but what it implies about their attitude towards me. The person who sends the tell "u lf team lol" is probably perfectly capable of using standard English if he chooses to do so. Presumably he's used it on school essays or a resume at some point. When he addresses me in IM jargon the message it sends (to my mind anyway) is:

1. I am a lazy semi-literate, and
2. I could address you properly but I can't be bothered because you're not worth the effort.

The former is merely regrettable. The latter is personally offensive. If I'm not worth the two extra keystrokes to spell out the word "you", then find another mark.

If you're spending 40+ hours in a job where everything you write reflects on you and your employer, then I think some of that expectation comes home and finds its way into the game.

Misspellings and the like don't really bother me. What drives me absolutely crazy is not having enough context to figure out what they are wanting. It seems like every tell I get just says "Team". My usual responses range from "Yankees" to "Solo" to "Please tell me in at least 10 words why I would want to come team with you."

The thing that really bugs me is people misspelling "Villain" as "Villian" - not so much the error, but it causes others to misspell it as well.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shubbie Im very good at taking a problem and making it worse.

The proper basis for that requires that the first and last letter in any word (or sylable for more complex words) remains constant. So while the original phrase can be deciphered easily enough because it follows that rule, most intentional "leet speak" does not follow that rule because it wasn't meant to be easily deciphered by the average person. Because of that, the argument that because you can interpret the example phrase you can interpret "leet speak" is NOt valid.

I have to say, by far the best speakers of the (British) English language are those that learn it as a second tongue. I have many German and Dutch friends who speak much better English than most English people, though given the... quality... of the average English person these days, I guess that's not too much of an achievement.

Sometimes, if I make a typo I say "I need a new keyboard...this one can't spell."

'Fingers tripping over themselves' happens. Typos don't bother me. They happen to the best of us, and I'm as guilty as anyone else of wanting to slap my own fingers with a ruler for their bumbling. Lack of interest in knowing how to spell a word, or even worse- knowing how to spell it and then continuing to use improper spelling- bugs the blazes out of me. When you are not in a hurry, or constricted by text limits, SPELL YOUR WORDS. Use 'you' and not 'u', use 'please' and not 'plz' (or 'pl0x', oh my gosh, where the HELL did that one come from?!), use 'thanks' and not 'tx/thx/tz/whatever the idiots are using now'. 'Thanks' is polite, 'tx' is 'I feel obligated to acknowledge your help, but I don't care enough to actually show my appreciation'.

There are a few common misspellings that irritate me more than others, but the one thing that honestly makes me grit my teeth the most? Improper use of apostrophes! Where did people get the idea that pluralizing something requires an apostrophe? If I have more than one sword, it's swords not sword's!!! Aargh....

Ahem. Ok. To sum up: Bad spelling doesn't always bother me, provided it's not bad spelling habits.

I just read an e-mail from my supervisor that used "there" instead of "their" no less than a dozen times. I almost just stopped reading it, and sent it back with nothing but a big F as a response. Ahhhh!