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.
Comment on Am I going crazy, or has people's spelling gotten awful lately?
libra00@lemmy.world 5 days ago
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 it’s not 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.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
libra00@lemmy.world 5 days ago
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.
KazuyaDarklight@lemmy.world 5 days ago
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.
scintilla@lemm.ee 5 days ago
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.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
This is it. Gboard autocorrect has felt shittier to me recently as well, so I turned it off.
libra00@lemmy.world 4 days ago
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.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
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
libra00@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Ah, fair enough. My bad for assuming.
starlinguk@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I’ve on the Internet for the same amount of time and it’s gotten MUCH worse.
libra00@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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.
scarabic@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Yep it’s always been shit.
makyo@lemmy.world 5 days ago
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
Arcane2077@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
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
independantiste@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
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 than it is spelling the words correctly especially with auto correct and syntax highlighting
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Apparently this post is not an example of that issue since your sentence structure in this comment is perfect.
CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
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
XeroxCool@lemmy.world 5 days ago
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
starlinguk@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Schools literally prefer to hire foreigners as English teachers because their English is better.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
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 only did 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.
lemmyng@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
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.
annette_runner@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Bruh slept through 13 years of English lessons 😂
XeroxCool@lemmy.world 5 days ago
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.
libra00@lemmy.world 5 days ago
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.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
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.
makyo@lemmy.world 5 days ago
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
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
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.