Comment on Am I going crazy, or has people's spelling gotten awful lately?
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days agoIdk 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.
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 4 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.