Correcting people's spelling and am I the asshole?
Once you start correcting people's mistakes over the Internet, you soon realize how badly people want to remain in the wrong. It looks like people deliberately choose to be idiots.
Imagine this situation: you see a YouTube comment, where a person clearly doesn't know how to use the apostrophe. It's very important in the English language and its misuse can lead to sentences being completely incomprehensible.
The commenter writes abominations like "say's" (says) "grandpa's" (grandpas). It's just one example of this. My natural reflex is to correct the person and ask if they are native just to be sure i'm not scolding some foreigner who can be excused (although poorly) for not knowing the language enough.
Then I reply:
are you native? learn to use apostrophes correctly
Granted, it's not the most polite way of correcting someone's mistake over the Internet. But it's not impolite either. I'd say it's somewhere in the middle. I don't lick the person's balls trying to be overly polite for no fucking reason like "Hey, you made a mistake, here's the correct usage of language quirk X". I'm also not an asshole insulting the person in the wrong, I didn't write "You fucking idiot, learn to use your mother language". It's a question just to be sure and a pointer for the person so they know what to learn just to not sound like an idiot. Seems fair.
Then I always get the same retarded response (if the person decides to reply)
English a sentence always starts with a capital letter.
It's hard to put in words how fucking stupid of a response this is. First of all, the idiot (it's safe to call them an idiot at this point) doesn't seem to acknowledge their mistake. Could be a positive learning experience, shame. Then comes redirection, or misdirection whatever you want to call it.
I might be wrong but you didn't spend enough time to correct my mistake, so I will continue to be wrong!
I don't think the difference needs explaining. Obviously incorrect use of apostrophes due to lack of knowledge and ignorance cannot be compared to the laziness of not starting a sentence with a capital letter OVER THE Internet. Moveover, if someone uses the apostrophe correctly only sometimes and sometimes not, you can with 100% certainity assume incompetence. This doesn't apply if someone doesn't start their sentences with a capital letter always. I don't know if the idiots saying things like this don't see the distincion or they deliberately choose to ignore how stupid this sounds, I really don't.
Comparing capitalization to incorrect usage of words/characters, let that sink in.
Even if the person actually doesn't see how stupid this is, it's always an opportunity to
- Admit fault
- Correct the other person's mistake
The ego doesn't let the first option happen, how come someone correct my atrocious spelling?
It's especially retarded if you make mistakes like this on the Internet. You can easily look for the correct spelling/definition of a word you don't know how to write correctly within seconds. That's what I did numerous times whlist writing this article. It's just a couple of seconds and you don't make yourself look more stupid than you already are.
Some may ask: why aren't you more polite when correcting people? (aka. why aren't you licking people's assholes even if you are right)?
If you spent the time I did correcting people's mistakes you would get tired too. I'm usually just writing a quick reply not thinking much, especially when knowing that you can't link the person to a place they can learn because YouTube deletes all comments that include links. A quick correction, a couple of words like:
"its" not "it's"
and I'm back to whatever I was doing. I'm not going to spend unnecessary time to educate people (and risking deletion of my comment by youtube, they tend to delete actually constructive comments) only to receive the same retarded response. but not all people are stupid. Some actually aknowledge their mistakes, and respond something along the lines of:
You are right, I should've written "its" instead of "it's", thanks for the heads up!
I then feel like an asshole. I could spend more time explaining the grammar rules of the English language to the person. But it's pointless, the rarity of responses like this is a reason not to spend much time on thinking about being polite, as there is a large chance of coming across at an idiot rather a reasonable human being.
Now let's discuss some scenarios where the incorrect use of apostrophes changes the meaning of the sentence or makes it lose it altogether A simple sentence:
Its kids
Written without an apostrophe, means the kids are owned by something, by "it" If it was written as
It's kids
We are pointing directly at the kids, saying, it's them!
A single character that changes the sentence completely. This may not be the best example, but I think you get it.
I encounter many idiotic misspellings of common english words, and what's interesting: it's usually butchered by natives. For some reason native speakers can't spell their native language. I'm thinking it's the fault of learning the language by listening to it. When you are learning a foreign language, let's say in school, you usually do exercises that mostly involve reading and writing, much less speaking and listening. There's a very annoying mistake natives tend to make: Should OF instead of HAVE. For example:
He should of done that
You probably see how idiotic this looks and how much sense this construction makes. None. Still, they seem to not know about this. Probably because they sound (a bit) alike. Interesting. But there are many more instances of people not knowing how to write, some of them are straight up comedic so I have my own little collection of these. Here are some of the funniest/most outrageous:
Never knew someone could become a sleep
The irony
This pretty much proves I'm right
Classic apostrophe butchering
This managed to aggravate me even now, the power of idiots
I don't claim I know the language enough, or that I don't make mistakes. I do, and this article may be plagued with them too. I just don't act like an asshole when someone corrects me about it. And I actually check the spellings of the words I'm unsure about. Keep in mind English is not my mother language and I know it more than natives just by not being an ignorant fuck.
Addendum:
Remember, if you ever want to defend your inability to write: find anything that could be considered as a mistake in your opponent's arguments (even an accidental lack of a period at the end of a sentence) and cling to this as hard as you can. Bring this up as many times as possible, you will win the argument.