I am conflicted about typos - mike's web log/comments

April 03, 2012 | I am conflicted about typos | 6671 hit(s)

Here are some things that I believe about spelling and typos:

Our spelling system in English is sort of absurd. The same spelling can be pronounced different ways (lead: leed, led); the same sound can be spelled different ways (right, rite).

Many people who are extremely intelligent are not very good spellers. I see evidence of this every day at work, where people who are in the stratosphere of accomplishment send emails that include typos that are more than just fat-fingered "teh". Or for that matter, people who know a great deal more than I do about car motors, tax accounting, water heaters, phlebotomy, electrical panels, or diminished 7^th chords might not be sterling spellers.

Some spelling errors are so common that they’re called out in usage guides and there are entire sites devoted to the apparently futile effort to sort out the spellings once and for all.

So we have a confusing, inconsistent orthography that seemingly cannot be mastered by even accomplished people in spite of endless efforts to educate them. Anything wrong with this? Should we consider our current spelling system to be within the bounds of success? It seems sort of like designing a product that a significant percentage of users could not figure out how to use right.

And yet. In spite of knowing this, it’s almost impossible to set aside the instinctive negative reaction to typos. This has come up a couple of times recently in online articles:

Microsoft: Metro’s Not Just an Interface, It’s a Philosophy
This article originally talked about five core tenants (since corrected – see comments below the article) and still includes as of today If you want to know all of Microsoft’s new Metro Design Principals, check out the slideshow[1].

Won't buy Apple products anymore? Then don't stop there
This article referred to right of passage (since fixed) and still includes as of today diametrically opposed to the principals of the company's low-cost production model.

Here we have two articles by obviously intelligent writers writing for significant online publications (not, say, on personal blogs), and both articles include typos. Surely this should be some sort of evidence that these kinds of typos are within a standard deviation of acceptability, so to speak. The fact that the same typo (principal) appears in both articles and has not been fixed might even suggest that people don’t even notice this one.

I had a Facebook discussion about this, and among the Friends, one was laissez-faire (“I think it only detracts from credibility when it's a more substantive error”), but others not so much (“If I see two errors in an online article, I stop reading”, “I notice. It bugs the crap out of me, too.”).

I would like at least personally to be able to live in a kind of post-typo world where benign spelling mixups had no effect on my reading of an article. Not quite there yet, tho. Even so, I would like to believe that at least I do not share the “I hate people who can’t spell” attitude that seems to plague so many. Not today, anyway. :-)

[1] FWIW, the slideshow does actually name some of the principals of Metro design, namely the people behind it. But I think it's safe to assume that the gist of the slideshow is about Metro design principles.

Django Wexler 03 Apr 12 - 2:10 PM

I feel like typos are on a sliding scale, depending on both the obviousness of the typo and the medium. Comments, text messages, and blog posts feel like they demand less formal correctness than full-fledged articles or "official" documentation.

Also, for what its worth, I feel like "typo" is the wrong word for the mistakes you mentioned. "Typo" has always implied, to me, an actual error in typing (for example, I just typed "ot" instead of "to") rather then using the incorrect form of a word or mistaking one homonym for another. (Of course, in this age of autocorrect it can be hard to tell the difference.)

Django Wexler 03 Apr 12 - 2:10 PM

...for what it's worth. Always a peril in any conversation about typos.

mike 03 Apr 12 - 2:21 PM

> I feel like "typo" is the wrong word for the mistakes you mentioned.

True, but there is no one word that captures the idea of "using the wrong word" (that I can think of).

Yes, the bar for informal writing is obviously much lower, and lower still when one has been victimized by auto-correct. Still, the larger point is this: does it really matter that much whether people mix up principle and principal et al., and if so, why, exactly? I mean in an absolute sense, I don't mean in the "well, you should have learned the difference, you lazy person" sense.

Albertina 06 Apr 12 - 1:27 PM

I'm afraid my attitude falls more in the category of "I laugh at people who can't spell." And I agree that it can be a sliding scale: I laugh harder when I expect more from the writer. An engineer writing "overwridden" isn't quite as funny as a technical writer writing "good riddens." I try to tell myself that I'm laughing at the mistake and not the person. And I freely confess that I laugh at my own mistakes hardest of all.
The times I really feel guilty, though, are the times when I base business on language skills. I've chosen not to patronize companies with lousy copy. I've refused to work with a realtor who wrote, "Dose that make since." (I laugh about it still, though.) And I wonder if it's fair for me to base my judgment of companies on their communication skills -- even in part -- when the service or product offered may be unrelated.
I don't expect everyone to be skilled writers. I just expect companies/politicians/anyone-who-wants-to-look-good-in-public to hire good editors. :)

rootlesscosmo 17 Apr 12 - 8:16 AM

I recall a couple of failed efforts to "reform" or "rationalize" English spelling--one was G.B. Shaw's, another was a pet of the Chicago Tribune's publisher Col. Robert McCormick. (He insisted his papers use "foto," for example.) Besides the usual public resistance to changing familiar practice, there's also the fact--illustrated by some examples here--that no possible reform could get rid of the confusion between "principal" and "principle." (Unhelpful hint: the first is an adjective and the second a noun, EXCEPT the first can be a noun when referring to the head of a school. All clear now?) Dyslexia seems to have a material substrate and I don't see why chronic misspelling shouldn't as well; might it be a dyslexia spectrum condition?

mike 17 Apr 12 - 11:29 AM

There might be something to the dyslexia theory of poor spelling -- anecdotally, at least, some of the people I know who are poor spellers are also poor at what we used to call "sounding out a word" when they encounter it in reading. (For example, they're a disaster at handling foreign words.)

Spelling reform, such as we'll ever see in our lifetimes, will be a bottom-up movement, I suspect. Perhaps texting, instead of ruining English as so many like to bemoan :-), will drive some rational spelling reform. I don't mean of the "l8ter" sort, but perhaps of the "tho" sort -- reasonable shortenings that a lot of people could accept. (I'm on a personal mission to promote "thot" for "thought," actually.)

As for rules to remember spelling differences like principle and principal, well, the fact that we need the rules is already a fail, as the kids say. It's just more memorization, and one thing that seems clear to me is that people will expend some effort to get orthography right, but most simply aren't, what, motivated enough to put in the extraordinary effort required to master the intricacies to the level that word nerds do. And there doesn't seem to be a huge motivation to do so, since communication happens anyway.

[cont]

mike 17 Apr 12 - 11:31 AM

[cont]

I keep coming back to the analogy of fashion. Most people have a basic grasp of the "grammar" of fashion, inasmuch as they know more or less what to wear to work, to the beach, to a formal event, etc. But a lot of us don't really have a great sense of style, to the dismay of people who are attuned to fashion -- my daughter, for example, despairs when she catches me wearing socks with sandals. Mostly I just don't care, and I don't want to go to the effort and expense of perfecting my fashion sense. And mostly it doesn't matter. For what I do -- sit at a desk and type all day -- how I dress is irrelevant. (Since I often work at home, that often means, er, lounge clothes.) If I have a need to look sharp and I think it matters (attending a wedding, accepting a Nobel Prize, whatever), I'll check with someone who understands fashion better than I -- the fashion equivalent of having an editor, I suppose.