On Spelling

I like to think my English is pretty good. For someone who only ever did primary school level English, I get along just fine. I make mistakes occasionally. Everyone does. Most of my written mistakes are ones where I’ve written “in” instead of “on” and things like that, mistakes that aren’t obvious, and that are still words so a spell checker doesn’t catch them.

It surprises me though how many people just… don’t bother with good writing practices. Maybe not so much on places like Twitter, where every character counts, but everywhere else where people write in public spaces, there’s typos everywhere.

Of course, not everyone speaks English as their first language. I totally understand that, and being someone who speaks Greek and sounds like a retarded child when doing so, it would be a douchebag thing for me to judge these people. Those who learned English at school and speak it as their first language, eh, maybe I’m going to judge just a little.

There are other mistakes as well. In the era of constantly looking at your phone, not all of us have adjusted to smaller keyboards. Or people use things like auto-correct which seem to hinder more than they help at times. Personally, I hate auto-correct, but the feature is useful when it isn’t trying to ruin your life.

Really though, it’s good to have good spelling. It makes you look smarter and more trustworthy. Or at the very least, proper English standards make you look competent. These days, it’s not even difficult to make sure your writing is up to par. Most browsers have some sort of in-built spellchecker, word processors have spellcheckers and even if whatever you are writing on doesn’t have a spellchecker, you can easily find something that does, copy and paste it, fix the problems and move on.

Most of the time, you don’t even need to run the whole spellchecker. Red squiggly lines may be one of the many banes of my existence, but I’d be at a loss without them, as I regularly forget how to spell things.

But you know what pisses me off the most? People who spell people’s names wrong. On a regular basis.

Particularly my name. I mean, yes, my real name is rather unusual, so I don’t mind a mistake the first few times. But when I am in regular contact with someone, when I email them and write to them on a regular basis, there is NO FUCKING EXCUSE WHEN IT COMES TO SPELLING MY NAME WRONG. SERIOUSLY! My name is 1. in my fricking email address and 2. written at the bottom of every damn email or letter I write. It’s also plastered on my business cards and my work website. Even worse are the idiots who get my name completely wrong and call me something else entirely.

I know it’s the difference between a handful of letters but seriously stop being such ignorant fucktards. Be decent human beings, spell people’s names correctly, and if you’re not sure, ASK.

And for everyone else, get a spell checker. It’s totally worth it and makes you look smarter.