This is quite recent but I’ve been browsing Lemmy a bunch lately and quite often I see extreme grammatical errors.
I’m not talking about like, incorrect stylistic choices between commas and dashes, or an improper use of ellipses or missing commas or incorrect use of apostrophes in its/it’s or in multiple posessive articles or just plain typos or any nitpicky grammar nazi shit like that, but just basic spelling specifically.
It’s one thing when you can’t spell some pretty uncommon words and you’re too lazy to look it up and/or use autocorrect, but it’s a completely different league to misspell very basic words, very recently I saw someone spell “extreme” as “extream” which is just kind of baffling, I actually can’t even imagine how one would make such a mistake?
And it’s not been an isolated thing either, I’ve seen several instances like that lately.
Am I going crazy? Is it just me?
Ayi wudnt sei its oful, jast difarent
Been hitting the rum supply again, ye scallywag?
Don’t forget the internet is global. People for whom English is a second language are much more common than they once were.
True. Good point.
Came here to say that.
Yes yes you and many others have pointed this dumb take out already. I’m also a second language English speaker, and no one in my family even speaks English or ever has, and I’d never make a mistake like this.
You are going crazy. I’ve been on the internet since like 1992 and have spent many, many years reading forums and playing text-based role playing games, and this is very not new. Spelling has always been awful because the internet isn’t a formal medium where that stuff matters to most people. If anything it’s probably gotten better since the advent of smart phones with built in auto-correct.
I’ve on the Internet for the same amount of time and it’s gotten MUCH worse.
Idk I swear to god it wasn’t this bad like 6 months ago, nevermind 10 years ago. Again, I’m not talking about formality or punctuation, but basic grammar like spelling which as you said should be taken care of by autocorrect and I did notice an improvement sometimes around the mid-2010s, but very recently there’s been a noticeable decline, at least in my opinion.
What possible cause could there be for lots of people to suddenly start spelling worse? Wait, this isn’t another of those ‘smart phones are making us dumb!’ posts is it? Cause people have said that about pretty much every invention since the printing press. It’s probably just the frequency illusion, where you notice something for no particular reason and then start seeing it everywhere, especially if you’re only noticing changes over the period of a few months. Spelling was every bit as bad in 1995 as it is in 2025. Maybe worse due to the lack of access to spell-checking, auto-correct, online dictionaries, etc, and you can notice it especially in people who don’t read much (which is how you get spellings like ‘itsplain’ instead of ‘explain’, it seems like they’re guessing based on what they’ve (mis)heard instead of seeing it on the page/screen) even long before smart phones were a thing.
Not saying it is, but accidental, quality degrading, changes to a major/prevalent auto-correct system could result in what OP is claiming. Just to give an example.
This is it. Gboard autocorrect has felt shittier to me recently as well, so I turned it off. I wonder if there’s been any changes.
I don’t think most people realize how much they rely on auto correct when they are on a phone. When I switched to a new keyboard because I like local hosting my voice recognition the auto correct was initially way worse and my typing speed went down by maybe half.
No I’m not implying any conclusion with my post. Smartphones actually massively improved grammar on the internet through the joys of autocorrect in my experience
Ah, fair enough. My bad for assuming.
OP’s browsing habits likely recently changed to a place on the web with more English as a second language users. Those kinds of misspellings are pretty common with people who learned a lot of their English from streaming Youtube and other online shows
It’s the opposite. People learning English as a second language are typically much better spellers. Only a native speaker would misspell extreme that way
I think you’re overestimating the average quality of English as a second/third language education. The internet continuously becomes more accessible across the globe, which has overlap with lower quality and lower frequency of English lessons. There’s more exposure from speakers that don’t use the same native alphabet as well, so use is not so universal. When speaking is the primary use of language, reading is secondary, and writing is tertiary, mistakes get interesting. It’s not too hard to hear the word “extreme” but visualize the spelling from words like dream, team, cream, or beam, all words I could see being more commonly used than extreme. It’s easier to learn “very” as a modifier to a common adjective.
Source: I work in the US with mixed central/south American-born employees and travel to Mexico often. I see casual US-sourced mistakes, of course, as well as those distinctly from Spanish-speaking writers. My Spanish is just as incorrect. If you can say it out loud and still make sense, I’ll vote for non-native English speakers every time as the cause
As a non native English speaker I have more difficulty constructing my sentences in ways that make sense in English. It’s a lot harder to put my ideas into text in a coherent way that sounds right in English than it is spelling the words correctly, especially with auto correct and syntax highlighting
Apparently this post is not an example of that issue since your sentence structure in this comment is perfect.
I get the problem you’re describing, it does happen to me as well, but OP is specifically talking about spelling, which I generally do find to be worse in posts from native speakers
I’ve always experienced the opposite - native English speakers are horrible at spelling because they don’t have to put any effort into comprehending the language, vs non-native speakers who frequently have to take ESL tests for either academia, work, or immigration, and therefore had more exposure to spelling practice.
No they haven’t changed at all. I’ve been using mostly Lemmy as my one and only SM for most of the past year and this is a very new phenomenon to me. I’m also not a native English speaker at all, my mother tongue doesn’t even share the Latin alphabet
Well I guess I don’t know the timing but I wouldn’t be surprised it Lemmy was it - there are a bunch of non-native English speakers here
Are you fucking dense? I just told you that I’m also ESL, I don’t make such typos, it’s no excuse at all and makes it make not an iota more sense than saying the pigs are flying hence people’s spelling fell off a fucking cliff.
Lemmy is def not it, I moved here a year or more ago, the spelling has gotten very bad very recently and I only use this platform pretty much and this is where I’ve seen it the most by far.
My older friend and i were talking about this a about 6 months ago. We both are convinced auto correct functions are getting worse. I suspect AI injection into the function somehow, but tin foil hat me also thinks it’s strategy to force more people to use microphone. Seems way more valuable to data miners
I think you’re onto something there.
Whats that futurama meme? I dont know if i should be happy that if im correct or angry that im not wrong?
Sounds perfectly cromulent to me.
For me auto correct has a BIG problem when I miss a dubbel consonant. It will start suggesting words that doesn’t have a single letter in common with what I’m trying to spell, it will suggest completely wrong words and it will even suggest nonsensical words that doesn’t exist. Everything except the exact word I have spelt, but with two s instead of one.
Like yesterday I was trying to spell I believe it was “Necessary” but I had spelt “nesesary” and it was like did you mean “Acceptances” “approval” “appel” “sope” “opposition” “operation” “passport” like that isn’t even close to what I’m am trying to type.
So I can completely believe auto correct have gotten worse and AI dose seem like a likely suspect.
Especially the times when I completely don’t know what I am trying to spell but it gets that “Trioqulationitasitq” is supposed to be “tribulation”
I don’t know how in the world it can do that but think nesesary is supposed to be approval.
Oooh good tip, ill have to start paying attention to that
Completely agree. I cringe on a regular basis. I never know if it’s “stylistic”, typos, laziness? Sentence structure has also gone for shit.
I feel like auto correct and voice to text aren’t as good as they used to be. AI, laziness, I’m more of an idiot not sure who to blame.
It’s been awful for a while.
All the too/to/two or their/they’re/there kind of wreckage along with stuff like “for all intensive purposes”, “flee market”, or “diffuse the situation”.
There’s tons of writing like that everywhere. Wouldn’t be so bad if people learned when corrected, but I think most can’t be bothered.
My take is that people don’t read anymore along with probably an unhealthy dose of laziness and “gotta write all messed up to act cool” to boot.
Reading well-written books of any sort will help the mind fix how words go together and how they’re spelled. But today everyone reads everyone else’s shitty grammar, spelling, and whatever massacre of stylistic choices were made to stand out and look cool in the comment section of the youtube videos or tiktoks they just watched. That’s probably the extent of the reading they do.
I would not be surprised if autocorrect was a major culprit along with phone keyboards. You can type something correctly and have autocorrect make it wrong. It’s also super easy to get the wrong letter if you have normal sized hands and are typing on a phone keyboard. I have turned autocorrect completely off and am significantly less error prone as a result.
I frequently decide against correcting an error if I think my intention is clear, and I am in a hurry. I don’t really care what strangers on the internet think of my editing skills.
I hate this. For instance, using u instead of you, autocorrect often turns it to I. It also will fucking “correct” your to you’re when you typed your on purpose. I’m ready to just turn it off. It fucks up my posts, texts, emails all the time. I don’t have this issue on my laptop.
I think you mean it will ducking correct…
I turned mine off completely because it has bo comprehension of when an apostrophe is appropriate in front of the letter s. Forever making words possessive that were intended to be plural. Apostrophes do not mean “look out, here comes an s.”
Thi’s i’s new’s to me. Can you give example’s of when its appropriate to use apostrophe’s?
It’s not a recent thing, but I would say there has been a decline over the last decade or so. Not only does it seem like spelling and grammar are getting worse but I feel it is much more likely these days to find comments defending improper English rather than correcting it.
I saw someone spell “extreme” as “extream” which is just kind of baffling, I actually can’t even imagine how one would make such a mistake?
Maybe they had just come from dealing with large quantities of paper? Or enlarging a bunch of holes?
Anti-intellectualism has been on the rise for decades and spelling gets worse? I am shocked I tell you!
Also: inb4 the “language evolves!” crowd arrives.
So true. People are likely being fucked up by poor autocorrect algos, as I noticed even mine messing up and turned it off outright, because I blind type like 89wpm on my phone anyway so I’m fine without it. Then they’re defending it like ignorant fools that they are, reasoning backwards and perpetuating anti-intellectualism
Both are true.
One could also argue that language degrades. Just a matter of perspective. Evolution implies it’s good, but a lot of this evolution is little more than losing language features or clarity.
No, I think you does have point, I’ve been sawing that, too.
Mine has always been bad, but autocorrect seems to be bipolar as the years pass.
Lemmy seems to have a pretty high number of non-native English speakers, particularly Germans and other Europeans. I think this leads to people making seemingly simple grammar mistakes while also appearing to know English well.
Plus, American schools have completely gone to shit, so I’m sure that doesn’t help either.
I feel like it’s gotten better. I certainly don’t miss the days of “definately”. I feel like that one was everywhere. Its death is maybe the one good thing auto-correct did for the world.
I still see “defiantly” on a regular basis.
Yeah, a good example of auto-correct being - as is more typical - useless.
I do feel autocorrect in gBoard on Android works great.
It’s not just spelling, even online people don’t even bother using grammar. They literally stuff 4 different sentences in one line without using commas or periods. It’s maddening, honestly.
I absolutely loathe posts that just say something like “This dog.”
This dog WHAT, bozo.
This dog murdered my family okay it is a really bad dog and it’s evil and bad but also really cute so idk if I can hold a grudge against it but what it can hold against me is the gun that it has pressed to my temple because it has forbidden me from using any punctuation in this run-on paragraph
You’re not crazy. Nobody wants their grammar correcting; they lash out and call people who do that “grammar nazis” instead of thanking them for helping them improve. So they get to post whatever they like, and of course as more people see stuff spelt incorrectly they assume that’s correct and use those errors themselves, but intentionally. And of course the dictionary writers realise they are descriptive, not proscriptive, so the argument “the dictionary says…” is voided.
Autocorrect is OK to an extent but it’s not smart enough yet to understand what people are actually saying. So it gets switched off.
Also it is worth mentioning that English is a complex language with many inconsistencies. “extream” is incorrect, but “stream” isn’t, and that “eam/eme” is pronounced the same way. So “extream” is at least understandable. It’s similar to “ect” instead of “etc”, which is commonly mispronounced as “ek-setera” so you can see why people think the C is after the E.
I used to try to help people a lot but just got a whole load of abuse back. These days I only query something if I genuinely can’t grok what they’re trying to say. Or I just ignore it. If the question is so badly garbled that I can’t understand it I just assume they won’t be able to understand may answer, which will probably be quite detailed.
