I put a spell on you .

K

Kevin the grey

Joined
Aug 26, 2005
Messages
4,106
I put a spell on you ,

because you are mine .

My apologies to Creedence Clearwater Revival if I didn,t spell it the same way they did . I think there may have been a contraction and a little local color thrown in the original lyrics .

That is my point exactly . What does it matter how a person spells some words . If they get their point across and it is valid do you value it less if it is spelt incorrectly ? Does it matter to you if intelligent is spelt with one L or two if the person makes sense ?

Do you balk at this for legitimate reasons ?

It may be due to my upbringing and education that I am more tolerant of this.
My education was in English with a couple of years of intense French style schooling thrown in . Slap in a while of hanging around with Irish musicians and the lines get blurred considerably .

If you think spelling is important you should try gender . To the French some words are masculine or feminine with appropriate spelling and phrasing .
Did I mention there are no rules for this ? At least at the level I was taught you just know this through common useage .

They have a joke about it . " How do you know if table is masculine or feminine ?............. You check inbetween the legs .

Irish Musicians sometimes don,t even want lyrics written down except in cheat sheets . The songs are often passed down from one generation to the next with the lyrics and spelling changed considerably . It has almost led me to drinking Guinness. L:O:L

Americans and Canadians spell differently . Grey ,gray . Colour ,color .Night , nite . I was told my stories wouldn,t be considered by publishers in the United States unless I changed the spelling . It is not that the story wouldn,t be valued . It is that some publishers could not get a feeling for the story with the different spelling .

I agree that if the spelling leads to confusion as to meaning there may be reason for changing it . If not I tend to look at intent instead of content

I poot a spill on ewe ,

cause you are mime .
 
Probably my favorite all time song. Aside from the spelling debate, I mean.
 
A couple of typos in a post don't even slow most people down. The brain corrects for them automatically. But too many is like driving down a road with potholes, it distracts you every time you hit a bump.

But deliberately or carelessly misspelled or mispunctuated text is like offering information in a foreign dialect. It tells the reader you don't care how much extra trouble it will be to read what you wrote, you are not going to put in the effort to make it clear.

That's why we don't mind as much when someone makes mistakes because they aren't a native speaker of English. We can see they are making the effort just to write intelligible English at all.

In line with this, I personally can't see why British versus American spellings or even idioms should be a problem. It's actually a good way of signalling the possibly different viewpoints of writers from slightly different cultures.
 
Spelling, spulling who cares. English was one of my worst classes way back then. If I have to be correct then I prefer the American english. It is more straight forward and because it uses less letters it is more efficient. ie: color or colour. I say get rid of the 'u' it just adds more work to typing.

I am half german and half swede (two great steels from knifemaking perspective). So I dont kare howw yu spull it cuz az long az I understand wut yu R seying it dont buther me. Damn my english teechers ov the day.
 
Esav Benyamin in general I agree with you . It is our definition of when someone is being careless where we might digress . It is hard for me to think I know someone is being careless without allowing my own feelings to get in the way .

I also agree with the spelling of a word making a difference in definition.
Night seems softer than nite to me even though the G is silent . I would never write "good nite" if I was writing about the exchange between a man and a woman . Nite seems curt and perfunctory to me . (Humans can be funny old dogs sometimes .) L:O:L

I saddle the fence on this which we all know can lead to ballsing up the works.:eek: :eek: :eek:
On the one hand if I wrote a songbook and the printer mis-spelled
(mis-spelt?) a word , even a single word I would be most aggrieved . If a man said "I done finished running the water pipes" I would only be interested in the quality of his labor .
I would then get done finished with paying him . L:O:L

Thank you for your opinion . I am glad to hear from someone who both enjoys literature and studies language/s .
 
Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spikingwerld.

- Mark Twain
 
The trouble with deciding someone doesn't care about you or the forum because they mispell words, is the assumption they have the same moral cultural background as yourself. If we were all raised in Rome, expectation and value judgements can be specific. One can also be very different, an individual, and not have the same responses and implicit cultural cues.

I'm wary of a gross mispeller. But I have to remember my own mistakes with spelling. I got a forumite's name mixed up once and didn't even know I was mispelling it on numerous occasions. I got into a lot of trouble and misundertandings because of it. Now I address this well respected guy by his first name which I remember easily.


munk
 
Eric006 said:
Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling


Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spikingwerld.

- Mark Twain
Click to expand...

Tears in my eyes my friend . Well done . And yet old Mark Twain employed bad grammar and spelling in his books .

I think it was also his opinion that the right word was much better than the next to right word . It seemed he felt spelling and grammar should not stand in the way of this ideal .
 
Here are some more of Twain's thoughts on the subject of "spelling."

http://www.twainquotes.com/Spelling.html

(I love the way my own children, at homework time, treat me as their personal walking/talking dictionary. If I had a dime for every time I asked, "Have you looked it up in the dictionary?".....) :)

Eric
 
Thanks . He must have some Irish blood . He has the gift of Irish diplomacy .
His wit was not always as evident in the books that I read . I will have to look further into his work .

I remember my childhood and the dictionary question . Actually the definitions in the dictionary led me to the belief that language is not the stodgy unidimensional prose some literalists would foist upon me .

I appreciate the Mark Twain quotes . They are evidently not just something hastily thought of on your part .
 
The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the EU rather than German which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5 year phase-in plan that would be known as "Euro-English".

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of the "k". This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have 1 less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like "fotograf" 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be ekspekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent "e"s in the language is disgraseful, and they should go away.

By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v". During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.

After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi to understand ech ozer. Ze drem vil finali kum tru! And zen ve vil tak over ze world!
 
When I say someone is being deliberately careless, i don't mean he misses a few caps or transposes letter -- I do that myself and I don't always catch them when I edit.

But many of the younger posters especially will make no effort to capitalize anything, will not punctuate, consistently abbreviate words like 'you' as 'u', 'to' as '2', and so on, and toss in meaningless TLA (three letter abbreviations :) ) like 'lol' almost at random. I generally will not read or respond to posts like that.

I'm sure they can live without my input and I can sure live without theirs.
 
Kevin the grey said:
I appreciate the Mark Twain quotes . They are evidently not just something hastily thought of on your part .
Click to expand...

I wish I deserved the kind words. Much more of my communications originate from haste rather than from thought. ;)
(Hey, that pretty much sums up my approach to HI DOTDs. :) )

Eric
 
Esav Benyamin said:
When I say someone is being deliberately careless, i don't mean he misses a few caps or transposes letter -- I do that myself and I don't always catch them when I edit.

But many of the younger posters especially will make no effort to capitalize anything, will not punctuate, consistently abbreviate words like 'you' as 'u', 'to' as '2', and so on, and toss in meaningless TLA (three letter abbreviations :) ) like 'lol' almost at random. I generally will not read or respond to posts like that.

I'm sure they can live without my input and I can sure live without theirs.
Click to expand...

rite on esav. lol. W/ U 2. U R D man. lol.
 
You can actualy read with very little dificulty as long as the first and last letter of the word are right. I didnt beleive it untill they sent me a power point presentation that had a whole paragraph written like that. I dont know how to post it here if someone will tell me how I will. It also had some interesting optical stuff.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top