Monday 16 April 2012

Annoying misspellings

I can appreciate that people do often make typos: not everyone is a good writer/typist, and not everyone proof-reads what they write, especially if what they are writing is something relatively unimportant such as a comment on an Internet article. This being said, there are some strangely common misspellings that annoy me to no end.

1. Confusing "woman" and "women"
This is the most common bizarre misspelling I have observed. It is exceedingly frustrating when someone refers to a woman as "a women" and women as "woman": for example, typing that "Scarlett Johansson is a women" (woman), "Amelle Berrabah is a women" (woman), and "together they are woman" (women). I see this mistake frequently, and I find it hard to work out why this is so: when we speak normally we never say that a woman is "a women", and on the keyboard the "a" and "e" buttons are close, but not right next to each other in that it is easy to press both of them at once or hit one when intending to hit the other.

2. "Prolly" and "probably"
Mixing up woman and women may be the most common of the misspellings listed here, but by far the most annoying is "prolly" in the place of "probably". I have never heard anyone...either in the US or the UK, pronounce "probably" as "prolly" out loud, so I really do not see how anyone can misspell the word this way.

3. "Temporary" as "tempory"/ "temporarily" as "temporally"
I can understand "tempory" even if it is annoying: I have heard people pronounce temporary as "temp-ree", so I can see where the misspelling comes from. "Temporally" has somewhat of a resemblance to "temporarily", but enough of a difference in the pronunciation to easily differentiate between them; unlike the aforementioned "prolly" and "tempory", "temporally" is a real word.

4 comments:

  1. Ugh, as an English major, these grate on my nerves.

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  2. I am such a "spelling/grammar" nazi. It drives me crazy when people use stupid spellings. I have many, many nieces who are in that age where they are texting and their spelling and grammar are atrocious. My niece will text me something like. "Hey Mandee. We R gunna c u b4 u leave right?" And I write back "Hey Mandee. We are going to see you before we leave, right?" They have finally caught on that I am correcting their text. I also told my niece once, "Before. Not B4. I don't speak Bingo."

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    Replies
    1. Ha ha, yes, I get texts like that as well...although they're usually from people older than me! Like you, I strive to use the best possible grammar and spelling, too.

      Whenever I text back I always use full words/grammar, and sometimes even type up a couple of sentences to justify the costs of texts!

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