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points by wccrawford 11 hours ago | 0 comments

"none of these typos, with the exception of the jammed-together dialogue, prohibit access to meaning"

I hear that excuse constantly on the web if I try to correct people. And maybe it doesn't "prohibit access", but it does force me to think about things that aren't the point of the message, in order to figure out the point of the message.

I've given up correcting people. I'm old enough now that it's time to just watch people's choices come back on them. The whole world will pay for it, and I've done what I can.

I can't even get people to stop using "weary" to mean "wary". That's a whole different meaning, and there are so many people that use it wrong.

[–] swed420 10 hours ago

> I've given up correcting people.

I have a working theory that the prevalence of typos has been increasing in recent years, and it's on purpose:

* Humans trying to distinguish themselves from bots might add intentional typos to convey this

* AI bots, armed with the above knowledge, will also use this trick to seem more human

Of course, many typos are genuine, but this is increasingly not the case imo.

[–] sanex 10 hours ago

I've definitely tried to sound less robotic and will leave a minor typo so it's more obvious I'm human. We'll see when the bots or their controllers get wise.

[–] edoceo 10 hours ago

My phone frequently changes if to of, and "fixes" a bunch of things to be incorrect grammatically.

[–] nsagent 10 hours ago

I blame my iPhone for a lot of it. In fact I purchased the Duo because I thought the bigger keyboard would reduce the prevalence of typos. It has, but still not quite enough. Apple really has screwed up the keyboard mightily in the past decade.

[–] DavidPiper 7 hours ago

Greetings fellow weary wary observer, I'm glad it's not just me. This particular one often results in very funny sentences.

I've also given up correcting people, unless they've specifically asked me for editing help on a write-up or something similar. I offered draft editing to people on my previous team - it was surprisingly popular.

[–] nocman 11 hours ago

> I can't even get people to stop using "weary" to mean "wary"

Interesting, I don't recall seeing that one before. Do you think people are mentally just adding a 'y' to the word 'wear' (and still pronouncing it in their head like 'wary') -- or do you think they are thinking of it as the real word 'weary' (having the long 'e' sound like the word 'weep')?

[–] neilcj 3 hours ago

I think it's an unintentional merger of wary and leery.

[–] 8note 11 hours ago

i don't know how much of it has been thrown out/superceded, but Thinking Fast and Slow would suggest it actually makes you slow down to think about the material, rather than jumping past.

"Force you to think" as long as the meaning isnt changed, isnt a bad thing

[–] anigbrowl 11 hours ago

It is when the forcing results from negligence rather than deliberation. In those cases, you're not being confronted with an alien, difficult, or profound concept? You're being given a broken version of a boringly ordinary concept, and wasting your brainpower on papering over an orthographic or grammatical crack that should have been cleaned up by the author, or the editor, or one of the test readers.

In these cases, you're not thinking about the material; you're thinking about carelessly it's been put together, and how little regard the author appears to have for the audience.

[–] mpalmer 11 hours ago

The piece makes the point that a novel is about immersion in the text. Slowing down to think about the material is the opposite of the goal

[–] alberto-m 11 hours ago

Not sure about that. I mean, you misspelled “superseded” and this prompted me to take some time to write this reply. Maybe I will remember your point better for so doing, but is it really the best way to reflect on the topic?

[–] Timwi 10 hours ago

Don't even get me started on e.g. vs. i.e.

[–] novafunc 10 hours ago

Made that mistake for a while since some “that is”s can be read as examples.

[–] Isamu 10 hours ago

It concerns me though when a programmer “could care less” about the difference between an expression and its negation.

[–] badc0ffee 2 hours ago

To me, "could care less" is perfectly readable, because people writing that mean "couldn't care less" 100% of the time.

Now, could (or couldn't) "careless" bothers me.

[–] paulpauper 10 hours ago

Corectign can be pedanitic. If peopel can udnerstnad what you meant despite typeos, then successfull comjicaito nws achived. LLMs demsontrate this as they cna pasrse texst with heavy typos.

(typos deliebrate to prove point)

[–] mopsi 9 hours ago

You slowed me down; the communication was successful, but suboptimal. You also kicked me down to the level of a small child struggling to assemble letters into words, distracting me from the meaning of your words.

[–] bigstrat2003 8 hours ago

You seem to be implying that as long as someone understands you, that's good enough, but I don't really agree with that. Do people not wish to do a good job at things in their lives? I strive to use proper grammar and spelling, not because I can't communicate without them, but because anything worth doing is worth doing well. Why settle for half-assing one's way through life just because other people can understand if they put in enough effort?

[–] novafunc 10 hours ago

What is “comjicaito”?

[–] wongarsu 10 hours ago

My brain parses it as "communication" when reading quickly

Same first letters, the dots and the t roughly line up, apparently good enough for me

[–] mceachen 7 hours ago

The author briefly mentions that nits break the reader's flow state. Your comjicaito only proves the road navagable—not pleasant.

[–] cbfrench 9 hours ago

See also “tenants” for “tenets,” which usually results in hilarious alternative meanings.

[–] pixl97 11 hours ago

Eh, "modern people problems", kinda like first world problems.

Language has always been a localization of mispronounced and misspelled words. Just think about every word for an item but is just very slightly different across languages. The more modern age (lets say somewhere between the printing press and now) is exceptional as different languages and dialects have absolutely collapsed. Local dialects became regional and mixed. In smaller countries regional dialects became national. In big countries like the US meme words spread quickly across the nation because of things like radio, TV, and now internet.

You were living an a massively privileged position in time and you didn't realize it.

[–] anigbrowl 11 hours ago

Look, i make typos all the time, from juxtaposing letters to omitting words, but I don't assign cultural significance to them.

[–] pixl97 10 hours ago

>but I don't assign cultural significance to them.

That's just what it feels like not to be important.

In older books that persisted over long periods of time and popularity we've seen misspellings of the same word on the same page. These things got copied selectively over time and caused splits in language.

In the modern age quite often these misspellings can evolve into new words and/or memes. It's how language evolves.

At the end of the day it's very difficult to do anything about this at scale without reversing a bunch of technology. Simply put the average person isn't this careful in day to day writing. Yet we ask the average person to create more writing per person than any other time in history. By anecdotal observation I believe that most of these people don't want to shit out zillions of lines of text at all and only feel forced to do this by modern demands. Hence, this is why LLMs quickly took over shitting out zillions of lines of text. The people that were doing it by keyboard before were glad to give it up. The number of people that want to be precise about it is simply very low the same as the rest of history.

[–] kulahan 11 hours ago

So we shouldn’t worry about regressing? This is also true of science, hygiene, human rights, and about a dozen other things we would be alarmed to lose, even if they were only around for people living in a “massively privileged position in time”

[–] pixl97 10 hours ago

>So we shouldn’t worry about regressing?

The question is what can you do about it without becoming an insane authoritarian in the process and probably making things worse?

Progression or regression is not a "you" or an "I" thing, it's a "we" thing. Constant progression isn't much different from constant acceleration, you can't keep producing more energy forever, you eventually hit limits. In societies these limits much more quickly than the limits of the universe. Even maintaining status quo requires energy, so who are you going to get to spend that energy? And at the same time as all of this you still have all the base desires of the human animal. Greed and lust and selfishness isn't going away. The newer generations that didn't experience the terrible times isn't born with the defenses against terrible times like the old generations do, and over time the systems that are needed to protect against bad things fall apart because not enough people understand the costs behind them.

This cycle is as old as humanity itself. I don't think human intelligence is going to get us out of the trap unless we're talking world population scale manipulation or editing of humans.

[–] dduong 10 hours ago

Languages evolve. Words are borrowed from other languages, their meanings change, and so do their spellings.

"Entrée" refers to the starter in French, whereas in the US, it refers to the main dish.

"A date" in the sense of a romantic encounter, originates from the English use of "date" in the sense of a calendar date. The word was then borrowed back into French, this time with its English meaning (and is pronounced the same way as in English).

"Connoisseur" is spelled "connaisseur" in modern French, while English kept the old spelling.

"Con" used to be a vulgar term for the vagina in French. Today, it is mainly used as an insult to describe someone as stupid.