You are going crazy. I've been on the internet since like 1992 and have spent many, many years reading forums and playing text-based role playing games, and this is very not new. Spelling has always been awful because the internet isn't a formal medium where that stuff matters to most people. If anything it's probably gotten better since the advent of smart phones with built in auto-correct.

No, I think you does have point, I've been sawing that, too.

Don't forget the internet is global. People for whom English is a second language are much more common than they once were.

My spelling and grammar are a lot worse when I type on my phone. I also accidentally a word.

I don't bother with correcting it since I don't care.

My mobile spelling has gotten to be garbage because my phone keyboard autocorrects Sometimes and I've gotten lazy about Swype/deleting mid-word mistakes. My pen/paper and also physical keyboard spelling remains persnickety

I think this is finally being corrected, but for decades kids have been taught "whole word reading" rather than phonics. The basic idea is that instead of learning how to sound out words, they should look at the first letter and guess what they think the word might be based on context/pictures. The proponents of this method claim kids will memorize words as "whole words" and eventually be able to read.

So, they can't actually read. But they know how to look like they can read.

When you can't read it's not enjoyable, so you read less. When you read less you come across fewer words, which you don't really know how to decode anyway because you were never taught.

Anyway these kids are now adults, and even the ones who are smart still struggle with spelling and reading.

Check out the podcast Sold a Story, really interesting investigation on this topic.

It's not a recent thing, but I would say there has been a decline over the last decade or so. Not only does it seem like spelling and grammar are getting worse but I feel it is much more likely these days to find comments defending improper English rather than correcting it.

I saw someone spell “extreme” as “extream” which is just kind of baffling, I actually can’t even imagine how one would make such a mistake?

Maybe they had just come from dealing with large quantities of paper? Or enlarging a bunch of holes?

Increased reliance on touch screen devices with dodgy autocorrect probably accounts for a good chunk of it.

I know it is not uncommon for me to have to go back and edit something I wrote from my phone after I submit it because I didn't see the autocorrect mistake before hitting send.

It’s been awful for a while.

All the too/to/two or their/they’re/there kind of wreckage along with stuff like “for all intensive purposes”, “flee market”, or “diffuse the situation”.

There’s tons of writing like that everywhere. Wouldn’t be so bad if people learned when corrected, but I think most can’t be bothered.

My take is that people don’t read anymore along with probably an unhealthy dose of laziness and “gotta write all messed up to act cool” to boot.

Reading well-written books of any sort will help the mind fix how words go together and how they’re spelled. But today everyone reads everyone else’s shitty grammar, spelling, and whatever massacre of stylistic choices were made to stand out and look cool in the comment section of the youtube videos or tiktoks they just watched. That’s probably the extent of the reading they do.

It's not just spelling, even online people don't even bother using grammar. They literally stuff 4 different sentences in one line without using commas or periods. It's maddening, honestly.

Lemmy seems to have a pretty high number of non-native English speakers, particularly Germans and other Europeans. I think this leads to people making seemingly simple grammar mistakes while also appearing to know English well.

Plus, American schools have completely gone to shit, so I’m sure that doesn’t help either.

I've noticed mine got worse for some reason in the last five years. So many words that I've had no issue spelling I've lost confidence in spelling and need to look it up. Happened around COVID for me, not sure why.

I blame these f'ing phone keyboards and autocorrect. I can't see what I am touching, I can't feel it, there's no feedback, and I have to look up while I type. Whoever came up with approach deserves... A bad case of indigestion.

I would not be surprised if autocorrect was a major culprit along with phone keyboards. You can type something correctly and have autocorrect make it wrong. It's also super easy to get the wrong letter if you have normal sized hands and are typing on a phone keyboard. I have turned autocorrect completely off and am significantly less error prone as a result.

I frequently decide against correcting an error if I think my intention is clear, and I am in a hurry. I don't really care what strangers on the internet think of my editing skills.

I think that it's mostly just Lemmy being less dominated by native English speakers. Many of those mistakes that seem baffling "make sense" in some other languages

I no phone gudz mane.

No, but really typing on a glass slab sucks. The software sucks ass too and seemingly no OEM is interested in improving it or trying something new.
Android's spellchecker sucks at handling 2 languages at once so I gotta turn it off and rely on the keyboard's auto correct.
Both FUTO and Heliboard insist on not correcting obvious misspellings or change correct words to nonexistent ones.

I'm convinced we've gotten the maximum we can out of the touchscreen QWERTY format. EIther we get a new Blackberry KeyOne style device or we get some stenography-like software innovation that converts vibes to words, I dunno.

Ayi wudnt sei its oful, jast difarent

I'm burnt out man. I just dont have the energy or the careth to be accurate or even care about a small thing.

Most of the people you interact with online aren't native English speakers.

wu7 u m34n, m8? 4lw4y5 b33n l1k3 d15. /s

You're not crazy. Nobody wants their grammar correcting; they lash out and call people who do that "grammar nazis" instead of thanking them for helping them improve. So they get to post whatever they like, and of course as more people see stuff spelt incorrectly they assume that's correct and use those errors themselves, but intentionally. And of course the dictionary writers realise they are descriptive, not proscriptive, so the argument "the dictionary says..." is voided.

Autocorrect is OK to an extent but it's not smart enough yet to understand what people are actually saying. So it gets switched off.

Also it is worth mentioning that English is a complex language with many inconsistencies. "extream" is incorrect, but "stream" isn't, and that "eam/eme" is pronounced the same way. So "extream" is at least understandable. It's similar to "ect" instead of "etc", which is commonly mispronounced as "ek-setera" so you can see why people think the C is after the E.

I used to try to help people a lot but just got a whole load of abuse back. These days I only query something if I genuinely can't grok what they're trying to say. Or I just ignore it. If the question is so badly garbled that I can't understand it I just assume they won't be able to understand may answer, which will probably be quite detailed.

Worse: it's common for the younger generation to reduce everything to three-letter, monosyllabic slang. "Mid" "on god" "no cap" there's an intellectual laziness that's trendy and it's getting worse with time.

It also seems to be on the rise in online publications. Both spelling errors and synonym/grammar issues have increased significantly over the last year, most significantly in the last 3-4 months.

I make more spelling mistakes when autocorrect is on than when it's off (and every little update to the os seems to re-enable it 😬) because it constantly wants to change words that were spelled correctly, to a different word that doesn't fit the context.

My older friend and i were talking about this a about 6 months ago. We both are convinced auto correct functions are getting worse. I suspect AI injection into the function somehow, but tin foil hat me also thinks it's strategy to force more people to use microphone. Seems way more valuable to data miners

My phone is stupid and will automatically correct on its own to giggerish or to other words that makes no sense. That's why I do so many edits. I don't always catch the errors.

W3 g01ng b@ck 2 typ31ng 1n l33t?

Idk i ditnt notise anyting unujual

Gen alpha hasn't really been taught how to spell and they think grammar is stupid.

The Android keyboard always worked well for me, but I don't trust them one bit. So I changed my phone keyboard into something that is worse at guessing what I'm trying to say, but I'm somewhat confident I am not being surveilled through it.

I started using it a month or two ago, and ever since I have started making a billion typos when writing on mobile.

Also, I guess the demography of the communities you're in matters. I think quite a few of us over here are not native speakers. Sometimes I'll also write with my keyboard set to the wrong language by accident, "leasing to all mines" of freaky autocorrects.

There's a strain of "cutesy" spelling going around where swapping vowels is somehow significant. I just put these people on the blocklist, they have nothing useful to say anyway.

I, mean its only. Natural that weerd thangs criep into comments here und their

But it's been something increasing over time. Some of it is people just not paying attention, some of it is them relying on autocorrect and not spending the time to check what gets autoed. But, a lot of it is that people can't spell for shit, and don't care that they can't.

And, to be fair, as long as the basic idea of what you're saying gets across, how much effort is required? In your example, extreme vs extream, while one is correct, they both sound the same, and they even read the same. So if a person is just approximating the sound of the word, and never ran across it, do they have an obligation to go looking?

Now, obviously, extreme would be an unusual word to never have seen in print since it was over used in marketing for a long time. I'd expect xtreme to be the misspelling to show up. But even with a word that over saturated, does it matter?

I say no, it doesn't really matter. Yeah, I'd still offer someone the correct spelling, but that's just as a point of conversation rather than any obligation they have to spend their time and energy on vocabulary and/or spelling. As long as they aren't giving me shit for having put in time and effort into mine, and it's close enough to guess; or they're willing to communicate about that they meant if it isn't easy to guess.

For real, it does make my brain scream at me when I run across it. But that's my problem, not theirs.

Seriously, not everyone cares enough to edit it up. Why should they?

If you’re talking about my messages, it’s because I swipe too fast and don’t check the message 9 times before posting. All sorts of weird nonsense slips through every day, some of which I edit later.

If you’re talking about how native English speakers spell, you’ll find all sorts of weird mistakes that seem to stem from the fact that English is pure chaos, and navigating this mess is about as easy as programming with a magnetized needle and a hard disk platter. The way I see it, mispronouncing every word in a consistent manner helps me remember how they are written. The trick is to use a consistent spelling system of another language to form an auditory memory of the spelling.

So in my mind, every word comes with three entries: what the word means, how it’s pronounced and how it’s written. Memorizing a combination of letters is hard, but memorizing a funny sound that you can later decrypt back to a sequence of letters is easier. That connection has to be 100% consistent, which is exactly what English can’t offer, but many other languages come pretty close.

If your first language happens to have a fairly consistent spelling system, you can totally use it to memorize how English words are spelled. Native English speakers are obviously completely screwed, and that’s why spelling bees are a thing and why this post exists.

Mine has always been bad, but autocorrect seems to be bipolar as the years pass.

I swear to god working in an engineering field for the past 10 years or so has dramatically changed my grammar. Do you know who has the absolute worst grammar and spelling of anyone I've ever met? My boss. "First 2 channels shoul dBe woired for 0-10vDC" was a note he left on my desk yesterday. Do you know who's the smartest person I've ever met when it comes to electrical? Also my boss.

It's never a 1 to 1 comparison of intelligence fwiw. Everyone in this field spits out emails in half-cobbled together sentences and phrases and it just works somehow. When I type out multiple paragraphs and overexplain things, half the time they'll just come down to the shop to talk instead.

But yeah I have realized that this will bleed out into the rest of my communication haha. I'll look back at texts I send quickly to my fiance and see that I'm skipping words or saying shit wrong. Oh well, the ideas are communicated just as well most the time.

I make mistakes because my replies are often my stream-of-consciousness, and the primary review is mainly to make sure I even want to reply to the comment at all. I don't use autocorrect so my fingers slip frequently.

If you look through my comment history, a good chunk are edited because I catch more grammatical errors in my comment after I post. I suppose most others don't bother.

I'm not native English. It's imperfect English or writing in other language that not many would fully understand.

I make a ton of stupid spelling mistakes just because of typing on mobile 99% of the time. For some reason I CONSTANTLY miss the keys I'm looking for, or manage to press them in the wrong order somehow; swapping Ns with Ms, T with Y, R>T, B>N, inserting spaces too early, doubling up characters.

If i nevsr look up and jus tkeep typing, I end of with a garbled mess just liek this sentence is.

This can get much worse if I use the next word suggestions. I'll spot the suggestion I want, but continue to press the next letter; this changes what's being suggested, or just moves it to a different position (centered vs the two options to the side) but I still press where I first saw it which is now a totally different suggestion...

Lots and lots and lots of proof-reading. And I STILL fuck it up.

I know for me, I'm having more difficulty because of failing eyesight. If you can't see the word you can't perceive you've spelled it incorrectly.

I feel like it's gotten better. I certainly don't miss the days of "definately". I feel like that one was everywhere. Its death is maybe the one good thing auto-correct did for the world.

Could be people using a second language like others have mentioned. Another thing could be British vs US english. Webster changed how words were spelt in the early 20th centry to make them more phonetic for Americans, i.e. "colour" -> "color"

There's a few I've noticed in the last seven years or so - lots of Americans can't seem to conjugate "run". It results in horrible sentences like "I used to ran this game" or "I have ran this event before". No idea why that's happening but squirt those people with a plant mister.

It's even worse than people who don't finish the words they're writing "suppose to" and the like. In the brine with thee!

No you aren’t getting crazy. I stopped double checking my spelling after Trump became president the first time. Clearly most people don’t mind bad spelling so why bother?

I have turned metrics off on my phone keyboard and I swear it fucks up my choices.

My online grammar and spelling is like a drunkard has taken over my keyboard. Swiping is awful for accuracy

I'm guilty of all these. I'm dyslexic and have a hard time spelling. At some point the personal dictionary on my phone learns words and I don't get the warning anymore.

recently I saw someone spell “extreme” as “extream” which is just kind of baffling, I actually can’t even imagine how one would make such a mistake?

There is a mountain of anecdotal evidence, and a small mound of scientific research, suggesting that psychedelics can improve creativity even in the long term. Ask your doctor if LSD or psilocybin might help with your imagination deficit.

I think there are a few things happening.

More and more individuals are contributing to the Internet through social media rather than simply consuming. They are bringing their (lack of) spelling and grammar with them, resulting in the variety of mistakes you've noticed.

At the same time I have noticed more and more mistakes appearing in "professional" publications. I don't ever recall seeing a typo on an NPR website up until the past 1-2 years. Now I see grammatical and spelling mistakes almost everywhere.

I'm guessing it's a combination of laying off editors and using AI.

But at the end of the day, if a language isn't evolving, it's dead.

I've noticed the same thing, including on stuff that should be spell checked like news articles. Its not even rare. I've also noticed my phone (current android) it has been making it nearly impossible to overrule errant spelling even if it is not correctly changing it.

Overall I believe its entirely the lack of proof reading. Please god I proof read this let it contain no errors.

Fuck the people who get simple words wrong. Our language is degrading as tikok and video shorts are on the rise and attention spans decline.

Soon enough people won't have the attention span to even write anymore.

I switched to Heliboard and the autocorrect just isn't as good as gboard. It's worth it for me for the privacy but I have to constantly reread my messages

Most of my stupid spelling mistakes, missing words, and other typing errors are because I developed the terrible habit of proofreading only in the instant between hitting the post button and the subsequent UI refresh. The better my lemmy host is running, the lower the readability of what I've posted.

I've also noticed that muscle memory does some strange stuff to my typing. Like in the first sentence of this comment I typed "instance" rather than "instant." I meant instant but, since I work with AWS 5 days a week, my fingers autopiloted instance because I type it much more often.

Thats my secret cap, i’ve always had poor spelling

Smart Technology has always been about removing our ability to effectively communicate with nuance and assess reality that's what it's for. Autocorrect so you can't spell, google maps so you can't find your way out of a paper bag without them. People's lexicons have diminished, substantially since 2007. The quantity and variety of expressions used have dropped off majorly. All this connection with people all over the world and we use it to maintain quasi social relationships with people we hardly care about. It's a joke.

it's the mispeling vyrus

Spelling righte shows stranth of caracter.

U be baader-meinhoffing this shit?

People are dyslexic or not native speakers on here as well. English spelling is insane anyway. People fumble-eff around with giant sausage fingers on small screens. We collectively ruin our sight by constantly looking at screens from a foot away. Mistakes happen. I think I heard the first complaints about bad spelling on the collection of tubes in the late 90s. And we're still here.

In my case, autocowreck is the main reason for incorrect spelling and grammar.

I feel like auto correct and voice to text aren't as good as they used to be. AI, laziness, I'm more of an idiot not sure who to blame.

You are now interacting with other nationalities and ethnicities maybe?

Nazi*

Just imagine you having to fix a thousand pages of this. I feel your pain.

i typo a lot on mobile because small phone and i tap to text and not swipe gesture.

Honestly I'm not doing much effort to be correct when writing English. As long as people get more or less my point I do not really care

i gut no ider wat ur tlakin bot. i splel prefect.

A while ago I became terribly aware of people writing things like "apostrope's" to indicate plurality. I was pretty convinced that it was a new thing, but I've since found examples of people doing that far in the past! I'm not sure if they were doing it at the same rate but they had been doing it for a while.

I know that some foreign language speakers use this as part of their grammar, but they do so according to a rule system. The people I encounter doing this have only ever known american english and do so without any apparent consistency. If you're going to alter your grammar in that way, at least make it consistent! Like these weirdos. Professionals have standards.

Almost 10 years ago I began to see this trend online and at work where people were misspelling 'separate' as 'seperate' and I am still irrationally angered by it.

Can only speak for myself, but I think backspace is probably one of my most used keys, the number of typos I make. Generally, I don't miss these*, but when proofreading or rewriting parts of comments I occasionally leave a word in from a previous iteration or take one out that I meant to leave in, throwing a wrench into the flow.

I can easily imagine that for some people that goes to another level and they might be too tired or stressed to be able to even notice, let alone fix the mistakes they make. There's also some level of short attention span going on and people may not be bothered to fix it because they have to be off to the next piece of content or contributing elsewhere.

* The spell-checking red squiggly underline admittedly being something of a crutch. I've noticed an increase in the number of longer or more obscure words that I'm sure I was getting right before but now not so much. And about once a day, on average, I reckon, I reach for right-click to figure out precisely what I'm getting wrong because I can't figure it out.

Most of the time, I've missed a letter or am woefully wrong, but very occasionally it's not in the built-in dictionary and online dictionaries basically say it's fine. And the-e-en I rewrite to avoid the word anyway. Not everyone's going to do that.

[...] isolated thing either, I’ve seen [...]

comma splice.

originally read the title as "people's spending" so I uh.. I guess we should add reading comprehension to the list of things people (me) are bad at

imo some of the drivers for today's terrible grammar and spelling stem from a "rush to reply" e.g. people commenting "frist!"

Not sure about the trend but I know my absolute bottom tier skillz are language related. in school low grades in spelling, then grammar, then foreign language. At the end of college I swapped transcripts with a friend and his comment was something like. Wow you get pretty good grades, oh. except in spanish. Basically the only reason I stopped getting bad grades in something like spelling is that it stopped being a class.

I know it's on your exclusion list, but my phone autocorrects its to it's every time. I have to catch it and backspace to restore it.

Autocorrecting a misspelled word is one thing. Autocorrecting a correctly spelled word for a more common word is just wrong.

"Extream" is an archaic spelling found in dictionaries, so I wouldn't be surprised if this was just autocorrect/swyping. It also seems like 90% of the usages come from HumanPenguin or 1984.

It's the public school system. It's amazing that our country still functions. I was lucky being private schooled.

There is a few words I cannot spell, and I've just given up on them at this point (definitely, infinitely, critisism ).

Sometimes I type too fast and post a comment with a typo, and a few times the edit fixing it didn't federate.

English spelling rules, and some vocabulary and grammar, were mostly crystallized around the end of the 16th century, with the form kind of arbitrarily chosen to be (mostly) from southeast England.

English grammar rules and some spelling were asserted by fiat, by linguists who wanted English to be “more Latin.”

Check out the English PhD motherfucker over here

Who THE FUCK cares?

Cashiers here have started saying "have a good rest of your day" instead of "have a good afternoon" or whatever.

It's excruciating. It's only emerged in the last few years.

I know language evolves and all but not like this.

Ableism

I got perfect scores in english and grammar throughout highschool, passed the ap test, perfect scores on english portions of sap/act, passed the ap test, therefore didn't do any english/writing courses in college. (Gotten out of practice, when it comes to the correct way to type) I technically learned english 2nd and didn'tunderstand it in kindergarden so my internal logic has always been that I've proven myself and I don't need to spell or use grammar correctly anymore.

I've already proven objectively that I have a firm grasp on the english language, so now I just let the errors fly. The logic is terrible, but i'll go with whatever justifies my actions lol. People used to make fun of how I speakx so Id show them my grades and ask them if they are sure that they are the one speaking English correctly.

Also theres fr no reason to police spelling/grammar if the points gets across, being concise and clear is more important always.

Spelling? I'm not worried about spelling when it's been acceptable to murder grammar in public for 20 years.