Chris "Parmalee" ... and other comments on spelling and gramma

[gil4]

You just wrote 100 words, how long does it take to proofread?

 

It takes about 30 seconds. To proofread and catch all my mistakes takes forever+30 seconds.

[gil4]

Meh, I will learn how to spell a person's last name correctly once they provide me a reason to remember it. Up to this point Parmelee, Parmalee or whatever hasn't given me a reason to think he will be a meaningful player to track over the coming years (I hope I am wrong)

 

I know how to spell Yastrzemski without looking it up, but I know I have butchered Parmelee's last name several times. I agree with you completely.

 

On a side note, I have a son named Stephen, and his teachers always spell his name with a "v". One time he told me "I'm not mad at them. I'm mad at you. They spell it right." Someone need's to give Parmelee's parents a call and see if they can do something about that last name. (Of course, after the trauma of this thread, we all know how to spell it now.)

[ashbury]

On a side note, I have a son named Stephen, and his teachers always spell his name with a "v".

 

Oh, so you're the one who's gotten those teachers trained to spell my son's name wrong.

[Mike Sixel]

This kind of thing used to bother me. Then I realized being bothered by things that only bother me because I let them is unhealthy......

 

I do think there are several things at play....

 

laziness - I know I don't correct teh/the all the time....but does it really matter?

lack of proper eduction - your/you're among the most common issues (lose and loose is unreal, but happens so often!)

indifference - a variant of laziness, but more about "this is not some formal thing....but a conversation, so it does not matter"

[JB_Iowa]

Please also note that as we grow older, we don't necessarily catch/see things as quickly as we did in our 20's and 30's.

 

I usually re-read my posts (and often use "go advanced" because seeing it as it will post is a little different than seeing it in the square box) but even then, it is easy to miss something.

 

Example: All day yesterday I thought the thread starter's name was "churchadoro" (and I looked at it 3 or 4 times). It wasn't until this a.m. that I saw it was "chuchadoro".

 

Also, there are an awful lot of names to see/figure out in Spring Training. I hope we all get better as the season goes along and the "regulars" settle in. The people who have strong interests in the prospects and minor leaguers will settle in to that board a little more and I expect that those threads will do better on spelling many of those names. And I expect the main board will do a little better at spelling the names of regular players.

 

If someone misspells a name, it isn't a matter of disrespect. A lot of times, someone may spell a name one way because it has always sounded that way to them. And sometimes we just get one spelling in our head and it is hard to "expel". For example, I do a ton of genealogy research but for years I spelled "cemetery" as "cemetary". It was just a bad habit that I never corrected until I was e-mailing with someone who consistently spelled it correctly.

[PseudoSABR]

That being said, I find the "my fingers move faster than my brain" justification tiresome. You just wrote 100 words, how long does it take to proofread? Don't make hundreds of others slog through your post just because you need your opinion known RIGHT NOW! We will still be here after you glance it over.

Again, you're valuing polish over things like clarity, precision, extension, and persuasion. It's not that some of us have to have our opinion heard right now, it's that when we do proof our posts we have grammatical polish as a lower priority over some of the other qualities of writing I mention; it's the way we are wired. Just because it's easy for you and a priority for you, doesn't mean that it should only take 30 seconds to proof posts.

 

The following is largely to prove a point and not to deride anyone here. Please consider, the insistence on the ease of proofing seems a touch arrogant, as is the unwillingness to understand the context of how and why mistakes happen; more over, that people actually get bothered by it, seems haughty, thin-skinned, and petty. The character flaws cut both ways.

 

(Also your use of capitalization for emphasis is ungrammatical (RIGHT NOW); numbers above twenty should be spelled out (100), as you do in the following sentence (hundreds).) Don't throw rocks if you live in a glass house.

[Brock Beauchamp]

I really have no interest in re-entering this conversation but his post was correct.

 

Anything under 10 should be spelled out (one, two, three, etc.) and anything 10 or above should be numerical (10, 20, 30, etc.).

 

https://www.grammarbook.com/numbers/numbers.asp

[JB_Iowa]

This thread has "jumped the shark".

[Brock Beauchamp]

http://gifatron.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/jump-the-shark-arrested-development.gif

[chuchadoro]

You guys may be interested to know that I just bought John Voight's Chrysler LeBaron.

[luke829]

[PseudoSABR]

I really have no interest in re-entering this conversation but his post was correct.

 

Anything under 10 should be spelled out (one, two, three, etc.) and anything 10 or above should be numerical (10, 20, 30, etc.).

 

https://www.grammarbook.com/numbers/numbers.asp

No, you want to re-enter the debate completely on your terms, and address none of the criticism.

 

The rule is hardly hard and fast* (you've double, triple checked this, no?). It's fair to say that I misunderstood the nebulous rule, and I accept my mistake in that, but my point: the rule is petty and arbitrary. Sometimes it's above a certain number, sometimes it involves the number of words it takes to write it out, sometimes it involves round numbers or large numbers, but largely it's a matter of style. Still, THE CAPITALIZING FOR EMPHASIS is just weak and wrong.

 

 

*"Write out numbers that require no more than two words remembering that a hyphenated number between twenty-one and ninety-nine counts as one word." So 100, should still be one hundred (or a hundred, or one-hundred, heh) according to this. This crap is hardly concrete.

 

https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/593/01/

http://grammar.yourdictionary.com/grammar-rules-and-tips/rules-for-writing-numbers.html

http://www.grammarly.com/handbook/punctuation/hyphen/11/hyphen-in-compound-numbers/

[PseudoSABR]

You guys may be interested to know that I just bought John Voight's Chrysler LeBaron.

I know a good dentist to verify that for us. He's somewhere in New Mexico last I checked, doing something with...chemistry.