I'm trying to write as correct as I can, but the GP just proved that these mistakes happen to everyone, even the people that think that it might make sense.
What about non-native speakers? Their point might be valuable, the participation in a discussion really help- and meaningful, but still - these now/know, there/their, you're/your mistakes are common. And not an indication of intelligence.
Edit: Just to be sure here and kind of answering the posts below: Guys, I'm a non-native speaker as well (in fact, my accent is terrible. I try to write as decent as possible, but that's a different thing). So - my data point, without any backing but my past experience, is that this is indeed an error that non-native speakers do just as well. I didn't want to imply that non-native speakers are idiots per se according to the criteria of this blog.
In my head, "then" and "than" sound totally different. Same with "they're", "their", and "there", "loose" and "lose", etc.
Probably this just proves that my accent is crap, but for me 'then' and 'than' sound about ~the same~, ditto for 'their'/'there' and 'loose'/'lose'. Again - probably I'm just missing something here. Improving my spoken English is definitely on the list of things I want to do..
When I speak, of course, they sound identical, but my spoken accent is not the accent I think in.
You just triggered an image of my first english teacher. 'To be plus adjective, adjective plus noun, verb plus adverb' was her favorite. ;)
"I'm doing good" instead of "I'm doing well" "He eats real fast" instead of "He eats really quickly"
If enough people speak that way, I don't think you can call it "wrong" so much as a dialect in its own right.
Fast and good are de facto adverbs. Maybe in some American dialects it's common to use other adjectives as adverbs, but not in mine.
Agree that language changes.
Did you mean "He is probably an idiot." or "They are probably idiots."?
The Internet has democratized widely published writing. There is no quality control over comments, except through communities. At the same time, there are large populations who place are undereducated and place little value on education, while they do prize the ability to get a rise out of others.
An unfortunate consequence of this: reading more used to make me feel smarter and I'd sound more literate. Nowadays, through reading reading I tend to absorb things like "loose" for "lose" and other atrocious sounding quirks.
There is a clear market for quality text, and there is power in being the provider of it.
We'll forgive the less common words like your "grammer".
:)
Originally I wanted to write something along the line "whoever's grammar is loose lose" but I am almost sure this is not a correct form
Would you consider dyslexia an excuse, or English as a second language? Or even semi-illiteracy? I think it's definitely possible to be very clever and still not a good speller, and not bother to double-check on an Internet forum.
Einstein was notorious as a poor speller, which suggests he didn't double-check himself.
Ignorance and IQ are certainly different. But IQ is generally measuring "problem solving ability", and when to use a contraction is a problem. If one is very clever, one tends to have that particular problem solved. But, whether the misuse is from inability to solve the problem, or a choice to not solve the problem ("can't be bothered"), either of those is a reasonable predictor of job performance, health, and various other life outcomes.
On "Einstein was notorious as a poor speller" – after moving to the US, Einstein became completely bilingual but could never recall how to spell words correctly in both German and English. This is not the same issue as when to use a contraction, and isn't the same as "not bothering".
The ESL student learns, understands the theory of, and tends to be careful with contractions. ESL errors look and sound quite different than most of these errors encountered online.
The illiterate "I'm too cool for your TL;DR grammar-nazi wall-of-text" types have failed to prime they're Baysian neural networks by reading or doing homework, and generally have no idea their "doing it wrong".
I see what you did there.
As far as using common homonyms and misspellings as predictors of "job performance, health, and various other life outcomes", well, I'm not quite sure that's reasonable. For example, xd's comment below:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2868142
has an error in it "Too many people will spill there emotions" but I don't think it's reasonable to predict too much based on that. There's several reasons these errors are common, not just inability or indolence.
There's often a slip between mind and the keyboard - I know I often simply type the wrong thing even when I know full well what the correct thing is. Muscle memory or something.
Edit: 'their "doing it wrong"'. Ah yes, very good :)
Your argument reminds me of the argument that someone ought to wear a suit and tie to work: There is no excuse for not knowing that a suit and tie is what people wear to work, and anyone who doesn’t do so is not fit to work here.
EDIT: To clarify, it doesn't have to be that stupidity causes bad grammar, but if bad spellers are likely to be bad commenters, that's all you need.
Establishing correlation without causation is a minefield, IMO, although each of us may come to different conclusions. Filtering people on the basis of correlation and not the primary attribute is discrimination. I doubt filtering a forum is illegal discrimination, but I’m uneasy about where that might lead me personally if it were my forum.
Giving a ridiculous example, at a certain time in history, correlation might have established that 90% of the people who used AOL to get onto the Internet posted idiotic things. Should all AOL users have been banned from forums? I suspect that many forums would have had a net positive benefit from such a policy, however the 10% false negatives disturb me greatly.
I would morally prefer other mechanisms for filtering the 90% out, preferably mechanisms that directly test user’s propensity to the “post idiotic things.” This is a personal view, and I can accept that others may not agree.
p.s. And then there’s the question of gathering actual data and not anecdotes. The worst way to proceed would be to claim that since we seem to remember that 90% of all idiotic comments contained grammar mistakes, there’s a 90% chance that a comment containing a grammar mistake is idiotic.
Those who miss nuances of thought and logic are often the same folks who miss nuances of grammar. It's a skill one can learn. Using that as a membership filter would be no different than forming a programming group and restricting it to programmers.
Not that I'm calling you an idiot, you have a very fair point.