[quote=“sgtrock21, post:20, topic:107660”] I only get upset when the error is made by someone who’s profession is writing. The article stated the driver neglected to engage the parking break.
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But…did that writer know the difference between the correct usage of “who’s” and “whose”?
I can’t turn autocorrect off. I tried. I use an iPad, BTW. Maybe the Mac/PC version offers that feature.
Hmmm. I jest a little but I’m a little shocked that a lawyer would dismiss the proper use of the language where one word can change an entire meaning of a document. I’ll admit that I don’t read for detail and tend to gloss over minutia unless I’m being sued, but that’s kinda what you pay lawyers for. I worked for a nun once and trying to explain to her the technical operation of a network system (as an administrator not a technician) I used the word kinda. She said “I don’t want to know kinda, I want to know exactly”. I looked for the ruler in her hand but didn’t see it, drove home, had a smoke, and was thankful to be a Lutheran. I understood later when it was explained to me that she dedicated her life to obedience, poverty, and chastity and expected the same of others. Didn’t fit me.
Trying to get back to cars but there are situations where language is important. I think of engineers saying nuts instead of bolts like the general public might, or use a high grade bolt instead of a grade 5, etc. etc. I hope we don’t get so sloppy in all professions so we don’t see instructions like take a few pills a day instead of four a day.
But I agree, on a car talk forum, its no big deal except sometimes you make a judgement about the person by the use of their language.
Or the grammar and spelling is so bad, you can’t make any sense out of the post. Happens much too often here.
Because a modern high school diploma is essentially a participation trophy.
Do cars have disk or disc brakes?
I am often puzzled by posts that are so garbled and difficult to understand that I just pass them by until others make replies in hopes they will decipher the OP. There have been several occasions that I quit checking back on garbled threads because it seemed no one could get to the bottom of the problem. On a few occasions it became somewhat apparent that the OP’s English was from an internet translation site but often the posts were from barely literate Americans and those are troubling.
You should accept it as it comes along, brake, break, whatever, now being a prissy sob, I cannot believe the number of people I see with a hilllbilly grip (I am a hillbilly) on their eating utensils.
That was my mistake. Damned English language.
These days I hear most schools are only required to teach kids to mark the correct answer to a question with a large dot using a #2 lead pencil @bing. And the funny thing is I seem to do great at those tests for some reason.I recall taking the ASE tests years ago and completed 4 on one night in the time allowed for 1 and the rest one night a week or so later.
Seems like a distraction and weakness that may be difficult to overcome.
50 years ago, I noted a certain segment of society that discourages education - and they seem to want the rest of us to be uneducated, too! To the point where they lobby to underfund public schools. Yes, throwing money at the problem doesn’t fix it, but the most certain way to strangle it is to limited the amount of money available.
I have noted that this segment of society has grown and become more vocal over the years. Their influence can be seen all over today’s politics.
When all is said and done, the English language is a very living thing! Over the years, things spelled “wrong” have become accepted and are now in the dictionary. Teddy Roosevelt singled out 60 words his staff should never use since they were “not good English”. Half a century later nearly all of those words were in the dictionary as accepted US English.
Last year I visited the South of France and a place called Nimes. During the California Gold Rush Levi Straus imported a sturdy blue cloth from Nimes; is was called “cloth de Nimes”! That word quickly became “denim” since most gold miners were not fussy literary experts.
Most Americans had trouble pronouncing the word for a new lightweight metal called "aluminium’. It was much easier to shorten it to “aluminum” The Brits and most of the rest of the world still call it aluminium.
@Rod_Knox, it’s hard to type on your phone while you’re driving and use correct spelling and grammar…
Agree! I keep forgetting that those posts that look like they were done on a smart phone while mechanical bull riding in a tavern were actually texts from someone driving or walking.
Spanish speakers who later learned English often have trouble spelling since English is not very phonetic like Spanish and other Latin languages.
That reminds me how locally Bois D’Arc has become bodock and few young residents of New Orleans know the correct pronunciation of the city’s streets. Of course very few of them know what a calliope is. But everyone seems to get Bourbon right.
Thanks! The ultimate linguistic perversion I ran across is a bay in Newfoundland, Canada , called Baie d’Espoir, meaning Bay of Hope. The locals call it… Bay Despair!
The problem isn’t money. Some of the best schools in the country have some of the lowest costs per student. We discussed this data often at the college where I was an administrator. In addition, throwing money at the problem never helped.
The problem is that the courts, school boards, administrators, and teachers, most of the culture, are saturated with extreme liberalism. They’re brainwashing our kids instead of teaching them.
There was a program in southern California a few years back called “Ebonics”, wherein teachers in primary and secondary schools were required to accept gutter street language as acceptable English, even to the extent in some cases of having to learn it. These kids are being cheated. They’ll graduate high school unable to get a job anywhere but the local 7Eleven.
I read a comment by a secondary social studies teacher in California saying she’d “never correct the English in my students’ papers. It would damage their self esteem.”. Clearly she has no idea where self esteem comes from… and is too lazy or two lacking in her own English skills to be willing to correct her students’ papers properly. Her comments made their way into a program we were implementing called “writing across curriculum”, where we were requiring all profs to correct the English of their students’ papers, regardless of the subject they were teaching.
In short, money ain’t the issue. Unqualified, poorly educated teachers, poor administration, and pathetic court decisions are the root cause of the issue. The root cause is no longer what the teachers are teaching, it has become what the teachers have been taught.
I could add some more but you can’t talk about those. I remember back in the 60’s our speech professor in South Dakota exclaimed that people thought there was a communist conspiracy to ruin the youth by getting them interested in sex. She just laughed saying she didn’t think we needed the communists to do that. They’d do that all on their own. I’ve forgotten a lot but remember that.
Comrade Bing
Just now you were talking smack about liberals, blaming them for various societal problems
But there have been numerous times, when somebody else was making comments which were unkind to conservatives, YOU said we need to steer the conversation back to cars
Just thought I’d make an observation 
Db, are you saying that the problems 've described are caused by liberalism? I never said that, but if you insist… well, than, I must have described liberalism! Nice of you to point that out for me. Congratulations. How does your foot taste?
By the way, the subject of the thread is poor English. That and that alone is what my comments were regarding. And they were about only the subject, not personal attacks. Do you have anything to contribute about the subject, or did you just want to attack me personally?