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Comment by ddod | Hacker News Reader

I chose those two to start things off for two reasons: The first is that they stand out to me as pretty basic misspellings that don't appear in any sort of popular literature, so it speaks to someone's reading experience. You can take that for whatever importance it is to you, personally. The second reason is their frequency. If the unit of measurement was larger than a half-hour or hour, I could measure a bunch of other things (which I might still do). As it stands, anyway|anyways|yea|yeah occur 25k-70k times per 30 minutes.

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I guess I'm disagreeing that they're "basic misspellings" in the first place, or related to someone's reading experience. Informal spoken English is often different from written English, and some people Tweet closer to how they'd speak. That doesn't mean that the same people would write the same way if they were writing a book (they probably wouldn't use "yeah" in a book, either), or that a certain dialect of spoken English is "incorrect".

I think you're measuring something other than spelling here, closer to measuring prevalence of certain dialects. Especially in the "anyways" example: if there's something objectionable about that word, it's a usage objection, not a spelling objection. People really do say "anyways", and that would be the correct way of writing it if you accept that usage. Spelling it "enyways" or "annyways" or something would be an orthographic error, on the other hand.

There's no link between spoken and written English in the context of yea:yeah, as they're pronounced the same but either written correctly or incorrectly.

As for anyways, I think your classification there will depend on who you speak to (which is the point of the analysis).

The problem with your conclusion that 'anyways' is a misspelling and you chose it because it is popular (high 'frequency') is that it displays a common misunderstanding purists have of a language's evolution.

As Jorge Luis Borges once said, all words were once neologisms.

For something to be standardized or make it into a dictionary, lexicographers look at its popularity. If we reduce language to the most simplest idea, it is exactly this: a set of popular phonetic sounds from which humans derive agreed similar meaning.

The phenomenon of adding an extra sound to the end of a word is called paragoge.

For anyone that is interested and is not familiar with it, linguistics has a lot to say on the addition and subtraction of sounds at the beginning, middle, and end of words. Here is a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaplasm

Great points. I went into this knowing full-well that to many, many people, these misspellings were not considered as such. As the graph suggests, though, the majority of people still use the "older" spellings of "yeah" and "anyway". There are two ways of spelling each one (with "yea" and "anyways" considered to be the more nascent), and I'm approaching this from the standpoint of why the spellings are changing. Is the language evolving (suggesting improvement) or devolving (suggesting perpetuated errors). We could discuss linguistics, but what indicators are there from the data showing Reddit has a lower percentage of yeas and anywayss compared to Twitter? Is it simply the medium? How does that data compare to your anecdotal classification of the respective aggregate intelligence level of both sites' users? What do you think the data would say about HN vs. Youtube on the frequency of these (as you would consider) both valid spellings? This all boils down to me labeling the graph as common misspellings, but ignoring that, you should be able to make of the graphs what you will, as there's no associated hypothesis or conclusion.

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