Peeve

[vakkotaur]

Animals such as dogs, cats, and horses, that look like the they're walking on their toes, because they are, are digitigrade and can be said to have digitigrade feet. Getting that look is sometimes desired when building a fursuit, and I don't have any real problem with that. There are at least a couple ways of getting the look.

What bugs me is all the folks who either ask for help and advice or show their versions in fursuit communities who don't manage to spell the word. Very often I see "digigrade" or even worse variations and it grates. At least some are likely just typos, but when the misspelling occurs repeatedly, I wonder if that person shouldn't do any work on the design until they can get the spelling right.

Comments

[jcw-da-dmg.livejournal.com]

You realize, of course, that we are talking about people who type "alot" rather frequently.

[thecanuckguy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there's a whole nation of 'em just to the south of me.

From what I can tell, wrong spellings aren't corrected at all in students' works, as long as it sounds like it. (Hell, even on Jeopardy they don't penalize spelling (on the hand-written Final Jeopardy; spelling, of course, counts in spelling categories) provided no extra syllables are added.) I've talked about the stupidity of the average American student before, I partly blame the online culture (textspeak, 1337-speek, MSN/ICQ/Yahoo chat, etc., etc.) I didn't notice things this bad when I was a kid, and the Internet wasn't as pervasive then (I was really the only kid in my class in the 1980s that even had a computer (and of course I was picked on for it. Now you're picked on if you don't have one. Careful what you wish for I guess.)

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I'm sure there are a bunch of reasons. The only place that I think such shorthand makes any real sense is telegraphy, where there is a significant speed advantage to it (and it all gets translated back to normal if the message is for someone not working a key). In something with 73, 88, and all the Q-codes, text-compression fits right in. But everywhere else, it just makes the sender appear to be lazy and/or stupid. I know, text messaging has a character limit so some compression is useful there. I wonder if some subset of the Q code might be useful. Though I'd probably be tempted to reply to most "txtspk" with QSD.

A few days ago I read a post by someone who had taped an appearance on Jeopardy and he related that spelling was an issue, except on the big Final Jeopardy bit, where a misspelling would be tolerated, but only so long as it was phonetically correct.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Alas. Thankfully, I think I've only seen 'alittle' used as an example of why 'alot' is wrong.

[jcw-da-dmg.livejournal.com]

I suppose we have used up our allotment of intelligence. I wasn't even certain what allot meant.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

* rimshot *