Arrrrrgh!

[vakkotaur]

Occassionally people mix up "its" and "it's" and that's a bit of an irritation. I don't like it, but I know I screw up the same way from time to time, and if it's (it is - Got it right that time, yay!) just a one-off flub it doesn't bug me too much. It's like a typo. Everyone makes an occasional error, it's (Right again, yay!) the repeating error that is a real problem.

Lately, though, I've been driven to distraction by people screwing up apostrophe usage and getting plurals and possessives mixed up, it is as if rather than realize "it's" is "it is" they simply reversed the general rule (for which "it's" is an apparent exception) that plural is "-s" and possessive is "-'s" or, worse, they apply the apostrophe completely randomly, mixing everything up. Backwards usage at least has some, if wrong, logic to it.

The strange thing is that I am seeing this done by fairly articulate people. It's (Hey, got it right again. I expect I'll screw up somewhere in this rant. That is one of the rules about usage rants, it seems.) done by people who can spell, who can form complete sentences, and don't resort to irritating "txtspk" that would let me simply dismiss their text as being from someone too stupid to bother with.

Also, it's not just capitalized abbreviated plurals, like "CD's" for "CDs" which, while they bug me, I've gotten to the point where it's not a huge distraction. What bugs me are things like this:

Have you read any good book's?

Those are Orvans.

Huh? Any good book's what? Any good book's titles? Covers? Reviews? And how many Orvans were there? Was there a convention of folks named Orvan? These are jarring. They are potholes in reading. Everything flows fairly smoothly, then *WHUMP* there goes the suspension. Really, any suspension of disbelief is damaged by needing to do error-correction on the text.

Comments

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

Dude, I wear a pair of Orvans! They're so roomy in the seat! =};-3

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

I wear a pair of Orvans too! They provide good arch support without pinching in the toe and heel.

[jcw-da-dmg.livejournal.com]

I share your irritation. There are a couple of people on my flist who are apparently under the impression that proper grammar and punctuation are at the discretion of the LJ user. Their posts make my eyes and brain hurt. I could understand if the misspelling or strange punctuation were intentional or even consistent, but that is frequently not the case.

Line them up and shoot them

[jugularjaguar.livejournal.com]

Them and those people who put the Toilet paper in the roll backwards.

Yeah

[thecanuckguy.livejournal.com]

I wrote about this recently on my blog, a particularly egregious example I recently encountered. I will admit that spelling often goes by the wayside in favour of typos when I'm online, but when I write important emails or something else important, I do at least take the time to spell-check it (and entry fields are automatically spell-checked for me, like this one is being right now).

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Back when I was in elementary school (during the Revolutionary War, don't you know) they taught us that the plural of any letter abbreviation (such as CD) was to be written with an apostrophe (CD's) and the plural of any single letter ("There are two E's in 'feet.'") was to be written likewise. I know this usage changed later, just as hyphenation went out of vogue (what used to be "on-line" became "online" for instance) but I still tend to do both when I'm just typing along.

Revolutionary War?

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Not quite that far back, unless it was a different Revolutionary War than the one that first comes to mind. I just checked a dictionary I have (I don't know exactly when it was published, but a list of populations came from 1970 census figures) and, sure enough, that rule was listed as you mention it. Perhaps that's why "CD's" isn't quite as distracting to me.

Re: Revolutionary War?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately at times, the prescriptive practices for spelling and punctuation are set by leading newspapers like the New York Times and Times of London and the trends can shift quickly when one of them hires a new and opinionated editor.

Most Americans are unaware of these subtleties. I was taught to spell "surprize" with a Z, for instance, yet in my lifetime the American usage has completely shifted to the S form, "surprise." I have a bad feeling about computerized spelling checkers too, because they are going to shape whatever spelling the next couple of generations learn. In my opinion, they don't do very well at all. I keep them turned off because I find them horribly irritating when they try to correct things that I intend just as I have typed them.

[cathyr19355.livejournal.com]

Yes, I remember both the rule to which you refer and the change, and I am still inconsistent about which form I use, because I haven't decided which version I think makes better sense. :-(

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I think I prefer the absence of the apostrophe in the case of things like "LEDs" and "CDs" as with it, they expand in my mind to the nonsensical "Light Emitting Diode's" and "Compact Disc's" which I find jarring. The case of things like "She wrote her 7's with a slash through the middle." doesn't have that issue for me. So I suppose I might seem inconsistent in this case.

[cathyr19355.livejournal.com]

That's part of the reason I'm still on the fence. I see your point, but I still think there should be a consistent rule.

However, violations of this rule bother me less, because I see this issue as more of a question of orthography than of grammar. The "it's" vs. "its" rule is, to my mind, much different, and should not be subject to individual taste and/or whim.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I (thankfully) forgot about that particular bit of abuse. It is quite difficult to consider those who commit that as being literate.

[cathyr19355.livejournal.com]

I can so relate to this. I suspect that part of the problem is that more people are just making typing mistakes which their spellcheckers don't catch. In other words, I don't think that most educated people have forgotten the difference between "its" and "it's"; I think they've merely stopped proofreading what they type. :-)

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

That I can easily believe. Yet it strikes me as odd as while spell checkers are far from perfect, they do at least catch the worst errors of typos and even the LJ web interface has a spell check option. Of course, that is additional work to use. I understand a rant or short note being dashed off in a hurry and having some speed errors. What amazes me in a bad way is such things as a story that was obviously given a lot of thought having such errors. Do I have third or fourth draft sensibilities in a first draft world?

[cathyr19355.livejournal.com]

No, I don't think so. I do think that most people--including most intelligent people--are yielding to the Internet-fueled temptation of writing everything as though it is a first draft, without so much as scanning it for usage errors.

Spellchecking programs do not automatically check for *usage* errors, which is what this is. "Its" and "it's" are both legitimate usages in English, so a program that is just doing spellchecking will not catch them. After all, both are spelled correctly; the question we're debating is whether they have been *used* correctly.

There are, of course, grammar checking programs. However, I turned off the one in my (workplace) copy of Word, because it has the annoying habit of flagging things such as unusually long sentences (difficult to avoid in explaining legal issues) and unusual words (impossible to avoid in any kind of technical writing, including legal writing). If Word's program is typical (and I suspect not only that it is, but that it's the program most word processor users have), I can imagine people turning it off in disgust even if it might ultimately be of some help to them.

The real blame comes from trying to do too much, too often. As a result, so many people (me included!) dash off essays and other writing without a lot of revision. I'm better than many at proofreading my own copy on the fly, that's all.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Yes, there is that. And I quite agree about grammar checkers, they are well-intended but seem to be more annoying than actually useful.