Break VS Brake PSA

I was one of th posters that disagreed with the first post of yours that I saw. I don’t recall what the subject was but your reply made it clear that you inferred that I was calling you stuid. I do not believe I intentionally implied that. Glad you stuck around. Print does not include verbal and visual clues that indicate tone.

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Rilly happee tew cee eye downt halvf tew werree abowt spilling and gramer heer. Sew manee furems fewl of elleet fancee peeple. Glad we cen sellebrate owr lasee ignorantz.

Thanx fer all the reeples. No winner chowsen butt everewon gets a partisipashun trophy becuz its only importent to be heer and not importent to improov

Actually, that’s what “bragging” is. Otherwise, it’s called “lying”.

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Spellchecker won’t pick up those type of errors.

In other words spell checker won’t find any problems with your sentence as long as the words are correct.

My car has a break problem and eye wood like to no house to fix it.

Spell check won’t find any problems with this sentence. A grammar tool will have a field day but not many people use grammar tools and smartphones don’t always catch these types of errors.

I joined this forum and read about 10 different threads and easily 4 of them had the wrong use of break/brake. We live in a world where we can communicate through our fingers with massive amounts of technology making life easier and we as an internet society rejoice in our ability to be as lazy as possible and still post something.

I’m not a grammar sheriff but let’s try and use the correct word for the situation now and then. I often have typos from the phone. I simply read my post and fix what I missed after the fact.

I’m sure there are ESL’e (see like this one…I’m leaving in here as an example. e should be an s. I’d be wondering wtf is an ESL’e) on here who won’t be upset by someone suggesting a small correction to word use. I get that maybe you need info on your alternator but you are being pursued by a pack of rabid hyenas and don’t have time to proof read…we’ve all been there.

I don’t think anyone is saying spelling, grammar, or punctuation don’t matter. What I, for one, am saying is that we should give others a break (or a “brake,” if you prefer) and try to actually help instead of criticizing the way the request was phrased. If I can’t decipher a post, I make my best guess and ask for clarification. Sometimes it works out for the better and sometimes it doesn’t.

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“I’m pretty good” isn’t necessarily bragging. “I’m the best” is. According to Cambridge Dictionary, “brag” means “to speak too proudly about what you have done or what you own.” I’m not excessively proud, I simply recognize that “average” sets a pretty low bar. A former subordinate of mine fell off a ladder and, of course, landed on the floor. He was on the second floor of a building at the time but his incident report said he “fell to the ground.” If he had, he would’ve fallen an additional ten feet and most likely injured more than his pride. That’s “average,” in my experience.

Apparently, saying you can spell and assemble a coherent sentence makes you a jerk, and showing kindness and respect to someone who has received a nasty response makes you high and mighty. If so, I can live with that.

If only there was some sort of way to publicly post useful information like this about commonly confused spelling and words specific to a car forum where said words/spellings could lead to confusion in the question or answer. Some way to do it so it didn’t point to anyone directly but still got the message across to try and help. Wish there was some public message format but too bad nothing like that exists.

I recently saw a video online (clickbait type of thing) that shows a kid riding his bicycle into some bushes after attempting a small jump. The video title was:

Use The Breaks!

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I often wish smart phones would have a spell the word mode when using oral dictation. Then, instead of saying “break/brake” into the phone, you could put it in spell mode and say “bravo-romeo-alpha-kilo-echo” and it would spell brake correctly.

I decided some time ago that ‘Proofreader’ is no longer a position in most news agencies.

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Sad but true. A recent political email encouraged me to read “Bob’s not.”

I think the problem is that the articles are written by robots and not humans. Maybe from an outline or something. I don’t know how, I just read that but it would explain the errors.

The robots write grammatically correct, impeccably-spelled incoherent articles. The humans write grammatically disastrous, spelling-compromised articles of varying coherence. :wink:

A lot of your small local newspapers seem to dumb it down to middle school level. I use to subscribe to the Union Leader out of Manchester NH. Without looking at the by-line you can tell if it’s written locally or off the AP wire. The Eagle Tribune out of Lawrence MA is far better.

The average news paper and military manual is geared to an eighth grade education. I used to write operator / tech manuals for my employers products (mid range complexity measurement and control devices for industry and military) After years of fielding calls and questions I found eighth grade was an optimistic goal. People either do not take the time to read and understand or are not able to follow simple logic. The mistakes I see on on- line news and news streamers on TV is embarrassing, the writers are either pushed for time or were the low bidder for the job

If it’s a regular employment situation, journos don’t bid. They take the salary they’re offered. Oftentimes that’s sub-20k in their first job. Many of my coworkers in my first journalism job had to moonlight in retail just to make ends meet. One applied for food stamps and then got yelled at by our GM for making the station look bad. I managed only because I was exceedingly lucky not to have any student debt to pay off, and a very cheap apartment, and the ability to fix my own car… And even still, money was tight.

If it’s a freelance situation, journos are offered, say, $100 for an article. They then have to do all the research, interviews, etc, then write it. And then they don’t get paid until the article is published, which in some publications can take months. And even after it’s published they often have to keep asking for the money - they can’t demand too hard or they won’t get another gig with that outlet.

In short, it’s an underpaid profession full of abuse. That’s not much incentive for competent people to stick around. There’s a reason I don’t do it any more.

It’s one of the worst aspects of the American mentality - the idea that you should get all of what you want and not have to pay much of anything for it. We see it with journalism as well as right here on this site when people get angry that they ran their engine out of oil and the shop wants to charge them more than 50 bucks for a new one. This country will be much better off when we collectively realize that, yes, quality and excellence is expensive, and also worth it.

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For years, I have wondered if our astronauts ever pondered the consequences of being launched into space by the lowest bidder.
:thinking:

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Alan Shepard said just that before climbing into Freedom 7. :wink: