Maybe it’s just my having gotten a decent liberal arts education before heading off to engineering trade school, but it bothers me a lot that my peers and people I meet in the street all seem to aspire to a level of illiteracy that I find appalling.
Americans are already some of the least literate people in the developed world. Most Americans appear to not realize that there is a proper way to speak, and that they are not doing it. Some of this is no doubt a result of the education fads of the last few decades that honor colloquial speech.
Here’s three examples from this week alone:
- I was standing at the coffee shop, and overheard a nearby patron talking on his cell phone. Hi there! (pause) Well, I was incognito for a while, so when i got your message I called back..
No, the patron was obviously not incognito – which means “The condition of having a disguised or concealed identity”. If he was incognito, they wouldn’t have been able to leave a message for him – because they wouldn’t have known who to leave the message with. Instead he was incommunicado, which means “Without the means or right of communicating with others”.
- My CEO sent a memo (well, actually an email – who sends a paper memo anyway) with a dumb grammar error in it. It reads in part ” … there is a clear and important need for distribution of high amounts of data (Terabits) to multiple sights for analysis and then dissemination of the information … “.
This is not a 20-something CEO who might be expected to be illiterate, but a 40-something like myself who was educated at a time when they still taught the queen’s english instead of IM shorthand.Sights are “Something worth seeing; a spectacle” which is clearly not what he intended. There’s no need to move data to the spectacle (maybe from it, if you’re a news organization). The correct word is sites which means “The place or setting of something”.
This appears to be an exemplar of the increasingly common “correctly spelled but wrong word” phenomenon. It’s caused by using the spell checker and just ignorantly checking “accept” for all the offered changes. While I am not much suprised to see this in the homework of my elementary and middle school daughters, it’s wrong to see it in business correspondence.
I’ll leave aside for the moment a discussion of whether this fragment could ever make any sort of sense, either in context or out of context as presented here.
- Another co-worker recently sent a piece of correspondence to a customer, which began “Hi Nick, Glad to here things are going well.”
don’t think she meant to say here which means “At or in this place”. I hope she meant hear which means “To perceive (sound) by the ear”.
Two things make this error especially egregious to me. First, this was sent to a customer, so that not only does my co-worker look like she failed 5th grade, my whole company now looks like dummies by extension. Second, this co-worker was a Director of Marketing, who should have better command of the language than most of the other folks in the firm – that’s partly what marketing is about.
I’ve been using email and the internet since 1978 – and something has been lost in the language since that early time. The early email we sent was much like Victorian letter writing. We carefully proofread letters for grammar and spelling errors. Since we couldn’t see our correspondent face-to-face, we had to let our command of the language present us. Well written email with good grammar, impeccable spelling and a broad but appropriate vocabulary was commonplace.
Today, abbreviations, shorthand and phonetic spelling are accepted and commonplace. In the schools, teachers have given up on teaching “proper english” and now accept homework with im abbreviations, colloquial (street or ghetto) grammar usage and phonetic spelling. In business, most correspondents think nothing of grammar or spelling errors, or if they think of it at all, they think the errors make whoever commited them a l33t haX0r. Wrong.