Marmalising the English Language

https://forum.over50schat.com/t/the-land-of-milk-and-honey-boomerangs-and-kangas/49320/112?u=d00d

Just seen Gumbud’s post, he talks about ‘Afghanis from Karbul’, bless him.

I don’t know why, but I must admit to being almost abnormally concerned about misspellings.
I have become very careful to avoid any criticisms or even corrections as I’d be embarrassed to upset anyone intentionally.
I’m also a little surprised that so many people make such mistakes when most computer applications provide an automatic spell check (the squiggly red underlines). Perhaps many people are not particularly bothered about such things or perhaps just can’t be bothered to correct their mistakes. Anyway, as long as we can understand each other, perhaps that’s unimportant.

Local dialects and accents are, of course, quite different. They are a sign of the history of our nation. I’ve heard it said that, certainly until quite recently, there were some parts of the country where someone might have had difficulty in understanding a person from the next village!

1 Like

Well said JBR - I think spell checks use American English though, correct me if I’m wrong there! I hate sloppy speech where letters or word endings are missed. My pet hate is the lack of the letter t in words such as British (Bri’ish). I also cringe when anyone says haitch instead of aitch for the letter h. Like you I enjoy local accents and dialects.

Good point, you’d have thought he could have written it properly, it’s کابل so get it right folks, none of this anglicised phonetic rubbish.

Spell checkers are often the cause of misspelling I find, I believe they mostly need to go back to school! Quite often they cannot differentiate between the requirement for ‘there’ or ‘their’, ‘your’ or ‘you’re’, for instance. For my work I learned to touch-type many years ago and can do that without many errors, or I could until spell checkers arrived! Now, if I happen to catch a key incorrectly the spell checker will put in completely the wrong word, without that interference the correct word would be there first, despite not quite depressing the key correctly. Also as you say many people are not bothered about such things anyway.

Like you though JBR, I am abnormally concerned about correct spelling, also punctuation, something else that appears to be rather trivial to some people. Being rather pedantic about spelling comes from a 55-year working lifetime in printing, advertising and publishing where everything has to be correct. It’s a habit I find impossible to break, not that I see any reason why I should do so. :grinning:

1 Like

True. My recently purchased laptop had both Windows and Chrome set to American English, but then America is slowly but surely taking over the English-speaking world!
It annoyed me, briefly, before I made the necessary adjustments to revert to proper English.

1 Like

Yes. That’s as much grammatical as spelling, of course.
I’m sure that our failing education system is responsible for much of it.
My dad was born in 1910 and went to school in that era when far more attention was paid to the basics of the ‘three Rs’. Consequently, although he was working class and certainly not what they would call an educated man, he was well able to write neatly, spell, punctuate and grammaticise accurately, and was good with numbers.
Compare that to most of today’s school leavers!

cor blimey when I saw the title of the thread I thought oh goodie they’ll be talkin about different types of marmalade in different languages ? - how wrong one can be!

I think it’s wrong to be so pernickety with spelling ( is there such as word )
The spellcheckers often get it wrong and really does it matter . It’s only in relatively recent history that there is a standardised spelling for the English language .
I must say though I was walking around a museum the other day it displayed several letter from soldiers in the trenches and all of their hand writing and sentence construction was excellent despite their difficult circumstances.

The three fruit marmalade from Sainsbury’s is loverly

1 Like

I make my own marmalade from either my lemons, my kumquats or both, much nicer than any shop bought stuff. I used to have an orange tree too but it objected to where I moved it so it had to go.

Surfermom, Please forgive me that l dared to utter that offending word!! Ha!
As soon as l typed it, l knew l would be in deep water. Thank You for being so understanding of my slur against your nation’s vocabulary that has hit our shores!!

Bet that gave you the pip (sorry :blush: )

on reflection it could have read “Marmalising” the English sandwich heh?

download (4)

Exactly my earlier point. We think we’ve made enormous progress over the past 100 years, and in many ways we have. Sadly, at least since around 1960-70, in my opinion regarding education I’m sure we have regressed.

1 Like

but in this high tech world of computers ; fast moving phones that talk and type etc in slang and abbreviations - the kids of today do not need the english language that we needed 50 yrs ago - it’s a new age - cell phone talk and gimmicks - even on high tech data machines all abbreviations - perhapw we are just being old fashioned hanging on to these views?

That was exactly the view of the professor in charge of research where Marge used to work. A good friend of ours, as it happens.
I told him that I disagreed with his opinion that an inability to use proper English is unimportant and questioned how many research papers written in such poor English would be passed by the reviewers. He had to concede that ‘that was different’!
We’re still good friends. :smiley:

In a word - NO!

Yes -
Pernickety: “1808 = “precise, fastidious,” extended form of Scottish pernicky, of uncertain origin, perhaps somehow from particular.”

For some strange reason of their own the americans added an ‘s’ and made it ‘persnickety’.