Dennis Forbes is a Toronto-based software architect. While focused primarily on the .NET and SQL Server worlds, Dennis frequently ventures outside of this comfort zone into game development and image processing. He has been published in several industry magazines, has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal and has been interviewed by NPR.[The static location of this piece can be found at this address]
Rediculous - Results 1 - 10 of about 3,800,000 for rediculous.
It is ridiculous that such an obvious misspelling has become so prolific (correctness by repeated assertion), yet it's a great example of how contagious an incorrect spelling can be: Given that language is largely learned by example, it is inevitable that an endless exposure to malformed spelling will eventually infect the language of others, gathering a widening net of victims.
This is more of a problem now more than ever, given that many of us have supplanted - or entirely replaced - the professional writing in our lives (newspapers, books, professional papers) with the amateur writing of bloggers and forum posters: The "good" influences - carefully authored, carefully edited professional writing - have given way to carelessly hashed-out entries by time-pressured bloggers and marginally-literate forum posters, in a domain where the accepted rules of netiquette strongly discourage pointing out spelling or grammar mistakes.
Those who point out errors in grammar or spelling are quickly marginalized as "Grammar Nazis". Ignorance rules the day, and the social pressure encouraging good spelling and grammar has dramatically declined.
English is a very difficult language, with a tremendous array of conflicting influences, and a byzantine array of specialized rules and conditions.
It is, for instance, very difficult to conform to all norms of grammar given that many of them are subjective and conflicting (and many self-appointed gurus have themselves made embarrassing errors). I have absolutely no doubt that this entry, for example, has over a dozen real or subjective grammar problems: From the incorrect placement of a comma, to the overzealous use of a compound adjective, to the use of a colon where a dash would suffice.
I certainly make no claim of perfection. Where I find that I've made an error (and I heartily welcome emails to this effect), I try to correct them as quickly as possible.
Nonetheless, spelling is standardized (with minor regional variations), so unless one is intentionally trying to extend or adapt the language, some effort should be exerted to check the standards references to ensure that one's usage is conformant, just as one would ensure that their CSS or HTML was compliant with the pertinent standards.
The impact of the continued exposure to incorrect spelling and grammar can be extraordinary to observe. I've seen people corrected dozens of times, yet rediculous is so ingrained in their mind that they just can't break the habit. Soon enough other participants are perpetuating the misspelling, with the forum slowly diverging from correct English into some bizarre forum-localized lingo-ignoramus.
It might seem harmless, but this incorrect spelling starts infecting their professional writings (emails, instant messages, documents, signs, business cards - a domain where the laissez-faire attitude of the online world isn't acceptable), making them look ignorant and careless. That's if the fear of the same hasn't discouraged written discourse altogether (which is sadly very common. I've encountered plenty of professional acquaintances who avoid the written word like the plague).
It can even reduce the comprehension efficiency of written materials, as the reader's brain tries to rationalize the correct spelling on the paper with what they have stored in their memory cells.
It reduces general literacy.
If a reader's first exposure to analagous (analogous) or ancilliary (ancillary) are in a hastily written blog entry or forum post, naturally they're going to adopt the incorrect variant, perpetuating it to other entries and posts. Like a virus the misspelling infects new victims.
Of course it should be noted that language is indeed a "living" thing, and it does evolve and change over time - the English we speak today differs greatly from the English of yore - but the sort of ignorance that I'm describing has nothing to do with extending or adapting the language. Instead it's simple contagious laziness.
Good form or not, I am regularly going back and rewording old entries for improved clarity and readability, and occasionally even to correct spelling mistakes that made it under the radar (I have some eagle-eyed readers that very helpfully point out some of these errors. Rather than being irritated by the "grammar nazis", I am very appreciative to have the extra sets of eyeballs).
I do this primarily to ease consumption by readers: While the initial entry might have been rushed when too little time was available - but I thought the information or perspective were useful for someone - the entries live on and see far more traffic over time than at the outset. A correction here and there, and the refinement and rewording of a paragraph or two to make it more clear and concise, takes me a few moments, yet it saves dozens or hundreds of readers time in the future (and improves their comprehension of the content).
I consider the effort very worthwhile.
Furthermore, I try to run all entries through an up to date spell-checker before the initial publishing. To make the process more palatable, I have trained the spell-checker with all of my domain-specific terminology (the false-negative rate of spell-checkers is one of the primary reasons most people avoid them).
I don't want to appear ignorant by misspelling a common word, and I don't want to save myself a little time at the cost of every reader's time. I also don't want to pollute the vocabulary of readers with believable misspellings.
Just as one eagerly sticks a W3C validation banner on their page declaring their compliance with some level of specification, it would be intriguing to advocate a "spelling and grammar" standard mark. One that simply declares that the author actually cares, and does exert some effort to meet some minimal level of correctness in spelling and grammar. It would be a public sign indicating that they are open and thankful for comments and corrections regarding the same.
Furthermore, it would be advantageous if the major search engines - including blog aggregators and search engines - allowed one to refine results by grammar and spelling, optionally scoring academically correct content higher in the results. While sloppy spelling is no guarantee that the content isn't of value, there is a noteworthy correlation between the care and concern put into the spelling and grammar of an entry and the value of the actual content contained within: If someone couldn't bother spell-checking their entry, the factual content of their entry naturally has to come into question as well.
In the forum and blogging world, it would be beneficial if more tools supported convenient and efficient automatic spell-checking (the fact that no major browser has incorporated native TEXTAREA spell-checking thus far is a travesty. Any of them could have a killer feature if they simply added Word-like squiggly underlining of suspect words, with easy alternative corrections). As it is, many tools have nothing at all, and the few that do often host a ridiculously unintuitive, hacked-in partial solution.
Let's clean up English on the internet.
[TRAFFIC NOTE: This story, one of the few general interest posts I've made on here, has appeared on reddit, sending quite a few users this way. For those who've actually read this far, if you found this entry interesting I would appreciate if you could give an arrow up to it on reddit. Alternately if you think this is a dud, please give it an arrow down. Thanks!]
