Quote:
Originally Posted by Eric
Is correct spelling a sign of education, or merely a way of playing the snobbery & one-upmanship game, like being able to pronounce surnames such as Cholmondeley, Beauchamp and Pakenham correctly?
Any views?
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My view is that, because of the illogicality of English spelling, it's very easy to make mistakes, even for intelligent, educated people. In the first example you give:
Quote:
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The hare was so beautiful, I just couldn't bare to throw her away.
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you can understand how the journalist made the associative slip ('hare' in the first part of the sentence led him/her to misspell 'bear' as 'bare' in the second). The fault really lies in the lack of proof-reading. If the news article was heading for a newspaper, the misspelling would have been caught, but because turnaround time for articles on the net is so short, a lot more of these mistakes get through.
Does it matter? I don't know. Personally I'm very careful about my spelling, regardless of the medium I'm using (which doesn't mean to say that I don't sometimes make typos or even, heaven forbid, real honest-to-goodness spelling mistakes
). But I'm more forgiving of errors in other people, especially in less formal means of communication. I'll tolerate more typos/mistakes in an email than in an internet news article, for example, and more in an internet news article than in a published book.
I don't think poor spelling necessarily equates to lack of education or lack of education. Some very intelligent, very well-educated people seem to really struggle with English spelling. I think it has to do with the fact that, in English, there is no way no work out how to spell many words; there's just no rule you can apply to get the right answer. To be good at spelling you have to memorise the spellings, and some people just struggle with that.