Not to be a spelling and grammar nazi, but FUCK I'm sick and tired of the deplorable lack of English skills I see on YouTube, both in the comments and in the video titles and descriptions.
In one video about Commodore 128 programming, the presenter went over errata from her previous video. A clever commenter wrote:
"Irata is Atari spelled backwards."
Which might have been funny if that was how "errata" is spelled. I winced. Two other geniuses had given his comment a thumbs up. I groaned.
Now look, I'm not one to beat someone over the head for making typos and what-not, but here's the thing. I don't believe these are simple spelling "mistakes." People today consistently demonstrate a profound lack of understanding of etymology and word formation. In this case, "errata" is obviously related to "error." Therefore it should logically follow that spelling it "irata" would be obviously wrong.
Whenever I get to noticing these things, I remember how, in the days before the Internet, everybody kept a printed dictionary (and often a thesaurus as well) near to hand and habitually referred to it while writing. When in doubt, people naturally looked things up. With several online dictionaries available in literally the same Web browser you're typing in, it should be even easier to catch writing mistakes before you publish, right?
The problem nowadays is that people either have no doubt that they're spelling a word correctly, or else they just don't care. One may shrug and chalk it up to the Internet encouraging the use of shorthand to reduce the amount of typing one has to do, but I call bullshit. If you know what a word means, in the sense of knowing what root word it's derived from, it doesn't take any more effort to type six letters than to type five. Errors like the one above make me wonder if schools even bother to teach kids how their own language works anymore. The kids certainly don't wonder about such things. If they did, they'd look shit up.
In one video about Commodore 128 programming, the presenter went over errata from her previous video. A clever commenter wrote:
"Irata is Atari spelled backwards."
Which might have been funny if that was how "errata" is spelled. I winced. Two other geniuses had given his comment a thumbs up. I groaned.
Now look, I'm not one to beat someone over the head for making typos and what-not, but here's the thing. I don't believe these are simple spelling "mistakes." People today consistently demonstrate a profound lack of understanding of etymology and word formation. In this case, "errata" is obviously related to "error." Therefore it should logically follow that spelling it "irata" would be obviously wrong.
Whenever I get to noticing these things, I remember how, in the days before the Internet, everybody kept a printed dictionary (and often a thesaurus as well) near to hand and habitually referred to it while writing. When in doubt, people naturally looked things up. With several online dictionaries available in literally the same Web browser you're typing in, it should be even easier to catch writing mistakes before you publish, right?
The problem nowadays is that people either have no doubt that they're spelling a word correctly, or else they just don't care. One may shrug and chalk it up to the Internet encouraging the use of shorthand to reduce the amount of typing one has to do, but I call bullshit. If you know what a word means, in the sense of knowing what root word it's derived from, it doesn't take any more effort to type six letters than to type five. Errors like the one above make me wonder if schools even bother to teach kids how their own language works anymore. The kids certainly don't wonder about such things. If they did, they'd look shit up.
