In our search for truth, I peruse popurls a few times daily. Between stories of 13-year-old fathers and the latest auto bailout scandals, I occasionally come across stories on Gizmodo. Now, if you’ve ever visited that site, you’ll know that its commenters are not English majors. For that matter, neither are the site’s writers. To wit, is this little nugget:
We are sick & tired™ of people who pluralize by adding an apostrophe and an “s” instead of “es.” It’s not cute and it instead causes readers to stop and attempt to comprehend what is being said. [Ed. Good luck with that.]
The bar is set low by the site’s writers. We could accept an occasional error here and there, but grammatical errors are peppered throughout the site like Dick Cheney’s friends’ faces after a hunting trip. See how easy it is to use plurals?
As good as . . . what? Is “as good as” some new slang phrase? We must have missed that chain e-mail . . . . Good writers write, rewrite, and rewrite sentences refining and clarifying. We do this out of respect for our readers and it doesn’t matter if we’re writing a novel or a blog post. In truth, the nature of blog publishing allows writers to edit, amend, and clarify even after a post is published. There is no excuse . . . .
Good luck on the quest but I fear the battle’s lost. Texting (I am told) has changed the written language more in the past few years than it did in the previous century. And since spelling isn’t taught in school and poor spelling isn’t considered to be a sign of stupidity, laziness, or inferiority, the easy thing to do is just type something and shrug and say “whatever”.
While English grammar is relatively easy compared to many other langauges its spelling is beastly. And that whole apostrophe thing for plurals is made all the harder for some bilinguals: in Dutch the ‘s is used for plurals that don’t use the -en. So we have auto’s = more than one car but autos = belonging to the car. Fun, isn’t it?
I’ve read that dyslexia is very uncommon in those countries whose written language is close to the pronunciation, like Italian. If that’s the case, we’re doomed in English, with bough, through, enough, cough, and though (not to mention thought or even fraught), to list just the ones that came to mind.
I’m with you in your quest. I’d like to see at least a basic correct usage and spelling but am not hopeful.
Max