This is quite recent but I’ve been browsing Lemmy a bunch lately and quite often I see extreme grammatical errors.
I’m not talking about like, incorrect stylistic choices between commas and dashes, or an improper use of ellipses or missing commas or incorrect use of apostrophes in its/it’s or in multiple posessive articles or just plain typos or any nitpicky grammar nazi shit like that, but just basic spelling specifically.
It’s one thing when you can’t spell some pretty uncommon words and you’re too lazy to look it up and/or use autocorrect, but it’s a completely different league to misspell very basic words, very 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?
And it’s not been an isolated thing either, I’ve seen several instances like that lately.
Am I going crazy? Is it just me?
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.
Ayi wudnt sei its oful, jast difarent
Been hitting the rum supply again, ye scallywag?
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
I think you’re onto something there.
Whats that futurama meme? I dont know if i should be happy that if im correct or angry that im not wrong?
Sounds perfectly cromulent to me.
For me auto correct has a BIG problem when I miss a dubbel consonant. It will start suggesting words that doesn’t have a single letter in common with what I’m trying to spell, it will suggest completely wrong words and it will even suggest nonsensical words that doesn’t exist. Everything except the exact word I have spelt, but with two s instead of one.
Like yesterday I was trying to spell I believe it was “Necessary” but I had spelt “nesesary” and it was like did you mean “Acceptances” “approval” “appel” “sope” “opposition” “operation” “passport” like that isn’t even close to what I’m am trying to type.
So I can completely believe auto correct have gotten worse and AI dose seem like a likely suspect.
Especially the times when I completely don’t know what I am trying to spell but it gets that “Trioqulationitasitq” is supposed to be “tribulation”
I don’t know how in the world it can do that but think nesesary is supposed to be approval.
Oooh good tip, ill have to start paying attention to that
Completely agree. I cringe on a regular basis. I never know if it’s “stylistic”, typos, laziness? Sentence structure has also gone for shit.
Don’t forget the internet is global. People for whom English is a second language are much more common than they once were.
Yes yes you and many others have pointed this dumb take out already. I’m also a second language English speaker, and no one in my family even speaks English or ever has, and I’d never make a mistake like this.
True. Good point.
Came here to say that.
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 hate this. For instance, using u instead of you, autocorrect often turns it to I. It also will fucking “correct” your to you’re when you typed your on purpose. I’m ready to just turn it off. It fucks up my posts, texts, emails all the time. I don’t have this issue on my laptop.
I think you mean it will ducking correct…
I turned mine off completely because it has bo comprehension of when an apostrophe is appropriate in front of the letter s. Forever making words possessive that were intended to be plural. Apostrophes do not mean “look out, here comes an s.”
Thi’s i’s new’s to me. Can you give example’s of when its appropriate to use apostrophe’s?
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.
I still see “defiantly” on a regular basis.
Yeah, a good example of auto-correct being - as is more typical - useless.
I do feel autocorrect in gBoard on Android works great.
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.
OP’s browsing habits likely recently changed to a place on the web with more English as a second language users. Those kinds of misspellings are pretty common with people who learned a lot of their English from streaming Youtube and other online shows
It’s the opposite. People learning English as a second language are typically much better spellers. Only a native speaker would misspell extreme that way
As a non native English speaker I have more difficulty constructing my sentences in ways that make sense in English. It’s a lot harder to put my ideas into text in a coherent way that sounds right in English than it is spelling the words correctly, especially with auto correct and syntax highlighting
I get the problem you’re describing, it does happen to me as well, but OP is specifically talking about spelling, which I generally do find to be worse in posts from native speakers
Apparently this post is not an example of that issue since your sentence structure in this comment is perfect.
I think you’re overestimating the average quality of English as a second/third language education. The internet continuously becomes more accessible across the globe, which has overlap with lower quality and lower frequency of English lessons. There’s more exposure from speakers that don’t use the same native alphabet as well, so use is not so universal. When speaking is the primary use of language, reading is secondary, and writing is tertiary, mistakes get interesting. It’s not too hard to hear the word “extreme” but visualize the spelling from words like dream, team, cream, or beam, all words I could see being more commonly used than extreme. It’s easier to learn “very” as a modifier to a common adjective.
Source: I work in the US with mixed central/south American-born employees and travel to Mexico often. I see casual US-sourced mistakes, of course, as well as those distinctly from Spanish-speaking writers. My Spanish is just as incorrect. If you can say it out loud and still make sense, I’ll vote for non-native English speakers every time as the cause
Schools literally prefer to hire foreigners as English teachers because their English is better.
Just because a school has an entire ESL department taught by ESL speakers does not mean all ESL speakers are qualified to teach ESL.
American here:
About 20% of Americans are functionally illiterate, 2nd grade or worse reading and writing skills.
The average literacy level of Americans is between 5th and 6th grade… meaning the next 30% have the reading/writing skills of someone who basically only conpleted elementary school.
These are numbers for adults 18 and up, by the way, not kids.
Almost every single person I’ve met who learned English as a second language… can speak it more fluently than most native English speakers I’ve known who grew up in America. More extensive vocabularies, better grammar, better spelling.
And this will get worse.
Covid resulted in a year to two years of remote or missed classes for Gen Alpha, and the Repulicans look poised to finally kill off the public education system in all but the wealthier, solid blue states. Department of Education will be disbanded by the end of the year or earlier if nobody stops it.
I’ve always experienced the opposite - native English speakers are horrible at spelling because they don’t have to put any effort into comprehending the language, vs non-native speakers who frequently have to take ESL tests for either academia, work, or immigration, and therefore had more exposure to spelling practice.
Bruh slept through 13 years of English lessons 😂
Lessons are forgotten fast. Ask an adult to do 3 digit multiplication and watch them fumble. Ask about geometry and they’ll ask Google for a calculator. I don’t remember how to do projectile physics. All the same for English. If all a person does is speak the language while writing very simple messages (in comparison to English essays), the memory of complex synthesis is lost fast. If they’re not continuing to do those tasks in life, it’s gone.
I agree. My experience doesn’t really align with the idea that ESL learners are better spellers. English is a conventional language, so it’s not like there is a dictated spelling. Spelling is just a convention.
That would depend on how long they’ve been studying the language for, and their goals/needs in language learning. Someone who needed to learn English and pass formal tests for the sake of employment or immigration will eventually reach that level, but someone who either hasn’t been studying that long or doesn’t consider it a critical priority because they’re just browsing English websites and media for fun might not.
My guess is it’s just the frequency illusion, because they’re also super common among Americans who have only ever spoken English from birth. My theory is that these types of misspellings (like ‘itsplain’ instead of ‘explain’) are from folks who don’t read a lot and therefore seem to be guessing on spelling based on what they’ve (mis)heard rather than having seen it on the page/screen enough to notice the correct spelling.
No they haven’t changed at all. I’ve been using mostly Lemmy as my one and only SM for most of the past year and this is a very new phenomenon to me. I’m also not a native English speaker at all, my mother tongue doesn’t even share the Latin alphabet
Well I guess I don’t know the timing but I wouldn’t be surprised it Lemmy was it - there are a bunch of non-native English speakers here
Are you fucking dense? I just told you that I’m also ESL, I don’t make such typos, it’s no excuse at all and makes it make not an iota more sense than saying the pigs are flying hence people’s spelling fell off a fucking cliff.
Lemmy is def not it, I moved here a year or more ago, the spelling has gotten very bad very recently and I only use this platform pretty much and this is where I’ve seen it the most by far.
Yep it’s always been shit.
I’ve on the Internet for the same amount of time and it’s gotten MUCH worse.
I mean everybody has their own experience so I’m not gonna tell you you’re wrong, but that’s not been my experience.
I spent more than 10 years playing text-based roleplaying games (MUSHes) from like ~1993 on, and even people who had multiple scenes a day that were well beyond short story length were frequently just god-awful at spelling. I had a lot of bad habits I picked up from back then that I’ve had to break, some of which (misspelling ‘separate’ as ‘seperate’, f.ex) that still get me sometimes. So at the very least there has been no shortage of awful spelling in the early days of the internet.
By the same token I now spend at least an hour or two a day reading lemmy, reddit, etc and usually several more playing video games where I should’ve been exposed to all this awful typing going on and I have not noticed an increase, much less one worthy of capital letters.
So, I’m not saying it’s impossible, just that as someone who has spent a significant portion of their life reading text on the internet it doesn’t seem likely to me.
Idk I swear to god it wasn’t this bad like 6 months ago, nevermind 10 years ago. Again, I’m not talking about formality or punctuation, but basic grammar like spelling which as you said should be taken care of by autocorrect and I did notice an improvement sometimes around the mid-2010s, but very recently there’s been a noticeable decline, at least in my opinion.
What possible cause could there be for lots of people to suddenly start spelling worse? Wait, this isn’t another of those ‘smart phones are making us dumb!’ posts is it? Cause people have said that about pretty much every invention since the printing press. It’s probably just the frequency illusion, where you notice something for no particular reason and then start seeing it everywhere, especially if you’re only noticing changes over the period of a few months. Spelling was every bit as bad in 1995 as it is in 2025. Maybe worse due to the lack of access to spell-checking, auto-correct, online dictionaries, etc, and you can notice it especially in people who don’t read much (which is how you get spellings like ‘itsplain’ instead of ‘explain’, it seems like they’re guessing based on what they’ve (mis)heard instead of seeing it on the page/screen) even long before smart phones were a thing.
Not saying it is, but accidental, quality degrading, changes to a major/prevalent auto-correct system could result in what OP is claiming. Just to give an example.
This is it. Gboard autocorrect has felt shittier to me recently as well, so I turned it off. I wonder if there’s been any changes.
I don’t think most people realize how much they rely on auto correct when they are on a phone. When I switched to a new keyboard because I like local hosting my voice recognition the auto correct was initially way worse and my typing speed went down by maybe half.
That’s a fair point, I was just wondering if they had a specific theory as to why it suddenly changed since they were asserting that it had.
No I’m not implying any conclusion with my post. Smartphones actually massively improved grammar on the internet through the joys of autocorrect in my experience
Ah, fair enough. My bad for assuming.
Mine has always been bad, but autocorrect seems to be bipolar as the years pass.
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?
Anti-intellectualism has been on the rise for decades and spelling gets worse? I am shocked I tell you!
Also: inb4 the “language evolves!” crowd arrives.
So true. People are likely being fucked up by poor autocorrect algos, as I noticed even mine messing up and turned it off outright, because I blind type like 89wpm on my phone anyway so I’m fine without it. Then they’re defending it like ignorant fools that they are, reasoning backwards and perpetuating anti-intellectualism
Both are true.
I’m burnt out man. I just dont have the energy or the careth to be accurate or even care about a small thing.
carrot*
spoiler
/s
No, he just doesn’t carrot all.
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”
I’m also second language lol, I’d never do this, I learned how to write English before I knew how to speak it.
Yeah counterintuitively there are a lot of people who learn English as a 2nd language who have better grammar than native speakers because they actually learn the rules.
No, I think you does have point, I’ve been sawing that, too.
Look at Mr fancy pants here using punctuation like yer some kinda edumacated person of learneding
Youse*
Et oak thoug we awl mess that juan.
I scenes it to scenes it many time. OP is rite is got extream. Happnd all the sudden to
It’s the public school system. It’s amazing that our country still functions. I was lucky being private schooled.
