pump it or dump it

With a thonge in your cheek, I wonder what your tongues doing /forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif

Seriously, if the meaning is clear, the typos don't matter...... but even if the Queen herself had written it, on forums like this there will always be knockers.
 
OK, point taken, but leg pulling does not always work well in written form, it can look like nit-picking.
Of course spelling and grammar matter, but I don't think that we should be too pedantic.
Also you cannot always tell if the writer is using English as a first language. If not his / her English is propably better than my Serbo-Croat or whatever.
Incidentally, looking at your profile, I think you will find that "Prout " is a proper noun and therefore should have a capital P. Now that's pedantic if you like.
Dan
 
It can be a difficult judgement call. Picking up someone like tcm who can write perfectly good english, will sometime use txt like language, but if you confront him, he'll rip your grammar apart. I often do the same if in a hurry.

However, there is at least one extremely knowledgable poster I know who was reluctant to post here often as he is dyslexic and struggles to spell correctly sometimes, which is a shame as he has huge experience and knowledge to impart
 
I am one of those who believe that spelling and grammer are important although I am not very good at either. I do keep a dictionary on the desk in an an attempt to get the spelling correct most of the time

I was recently taken to task for making fun of one of our fellow forum member's spelling. I was informed that he was dyslexic and I subsequently felt obliged to apologise in a PM.

In the post to which you are presumably refering I assumed that English may not have been the poster's first language. Most of his previous posts are similar in that respect. I also notice that his e-mail address ends .ee from which I deduce, rightly or wrongly, that he is not in the UK.

Your comment may have been 'tongue in cheek' but it appeared as sarcasm and as you well know that is the lowest form of wit.

When making a post it is, in my opinion, a good idea to pause briefly before hitting the 'OK Submit' button and ask firstly, "Do I really want to say this in public?" and secondly, "Do I really know what I am talking about?".

Despite asking myself those two questions this time I am going to post this anyway.
 
if I may join in - I am more interested in what ppl want to say, not how they present it, and I most strongly object when others start to inhibit ppls contributions by nitpicking finer points of grammar, spelling, punctuation or whatever.
if you did that over a pint in a bar you would get a pint thrown all over you - and quite rightly so IMO.
allow others to express themselves freely, and have more ppl join in rather than just watching from the sidelines because they are not willing for themselves to be ridiculed
 
I think picking up on spelling is a form of bullying and dont care for it myself . I also keep a dictionary on my desk but dont use it often as im more interested in boats than keeping the spelling police happy . Just my view :O)
 
Zapruda

nope, spelling and grammar don't matter here, provided the content makes sense and you get your point across.

Zapruda (sp?) took the film of kennedy being shot in Dallas in '63 and his name is used to describe film footage where the content excuses all other faults- composition, camera shake etc. However, none of my posts come into the same category...

HOWEVER if you pick on bad spelling grammar of others - beware! These forums are about boating so i wdn't criticise people about poor grammar in the same way i don't eject a top mechanic who doesn't speak with perfect accent. Unless of course, they adopt a too-high moral standpoint, poor advice, get personal etc in which case it's okay, sort of.

This isn't one of my better posts, i'm afraid....
 
This is a bit of a philosophical rant....

I think that this is the start of the next great generational divide.

Between this/our generation and its predecessors, the divide is often seen as technological awareness..... (there will always be exceptions before people point it out). As sure as night follows day, there will be another generational divide, and we will be on the other side of this one.....

Our children/grandchildren are merrily learning a whole new form of communication, not a different technology, but a differemt way of conveying meaning.... where we have spent our lives talking to one another in local communities, such as work, or our village or neighbourhood, and value the art of conversation, our children/grandchildren will live in a more globally oriented, on-demand world, where speed is all important, and distance no object.... and with a common bond of values or interest. They will communicate using different media in ways that we probably all think 'will never catch on'.... A symptom of our developing prejudices and inability to adapt to a changing world, that will catch up with virtually all of us eventually. We are seeing this emerging in the form of texting, and e-mail discussion as a preferred alternative to talking.... a mechanism that many o us will never fully adopt (although this forum is rather self selecting, and will tend to deliver more people able to bridge the divides)

We looked at our descendants and wonder how they survived without technology, and how sad it was that so many died so young.... our antiscedents will look at us, and wonder why we wasted so much time worrying about structural language issues related to books and conversation, and communicated in such a sterile and inefficient manner.... where meaning needed explaining... when this old fashioned approach has become so irelevant to their lives....

Let me give a simple example....

A major sailing acheivement is made such as Elen MacArthurs recent acheivement.... within minutes we have wall to wall coverage, and are live, in real time debating the merits of her acheivement, and technically picking it apart. In previous times, this would have been the subject of yacht club bar discussions a few days/weeks later.... yet, even with our technically advanced society, we still have to pause our current activity, and divert our attention to the television or this forum to conduct that real time debate.... the future generation, IMHO will have the tools and skills to do that AS they continue their daily activities, and it will become completely intertwined with what they do....

Current thinking is that the revolutions will now inevitably follow an order:

Agriculture
Industrial
Technological
Cultural

A hugely interesting topic, and one which both fascinates and scares me...

Told you it was a rant.... but one that makes grammatical correctness IMHO a very very insignificant part of the future...
 
I am 53 or 55 I have never been any good at spelling, dose it meen i ave to stop posting. my 9 year old dauter helps me a lot,,,,,But ther are a lot o things I can do for my self that you lot keep askin how to do, so ther /forums/images/graemlins/smirk.gif
 
Ah!...Prescriptivist v Descriptivist - suggested reading...

Fascinating area of discussion..... the first term, prescriptivist, refers to the insistence of the use of proper grammar in all usage of language whilst the latter term, descriptivist, refers to the conveyance of a message irrespective of the use of established grammatical mores.

In indigenous English, colonial or post-colonial cultures, there is an emphasis on prescriptivism in grammar to convey some element of status on the user - to instill some form of hierarchy through the use of language. Descriptivism is often used to challenge this perception of an establishment hierarchy by providing an alternative mode of expression through language.

Two books on everyone's reading list on this very subject are "The Empire Writes Back" and "Language, Ideology and Point of View" which not only provide an insight on our use of language but, more interestingly, how others use language to influence us.

Just a suggestion for some summer reading......but I guarantee your posts will never be the same again!
 
Had an interesting dialogue with Milltech about this on scuttlebutt a few weeks ago. Language changes, as evidenced by the fact at the time of Shakespeare or Chaucer, that was considered 'proper' english, but anyone transported back in time would struggle. Even Shakespeare signed his own name in about 9 different variations. Even taken back to the 1920's or 1940's young people from here and now would struggle to understand idioms and idiosynchrasies of the language in use at time.

Language evolves constantly, and the rate of change is higher and higher.

The use of texting language is pervading general society, away from mobile phones, and particulary internet use on forums and chat rooms as frequented by younger generations, and even their written and spoken languages. I use it myself as it's a very convenient shorthand on occasions, as does swmbo. I know tcm does too, as I found when txting weather reports to him - the fact we both work in IT may have something to do with picking up on handy shorthand as we are maybe closer to the source, and you have to run in IT to keep up with any trends at all.

Language generally is going to take hugs leaps in the next decade or so, as children have shorter attention spans, and pop channels on TV provide instant entertainment of a sort us older types never had, while instilling a common form of communication across continents
 
Re: Ah!...Prescriptivist v Descriptivist - suggested reading...

Blimey!
All this because some bloke misspelled "prefer".
 
Re: Ah!...Prescriptivist v Descriptivist - suggested reading...

whatever the connotations of intellectual eliteism - the fact is that nowdays (IMO), with youngsters being turnout out onto the marketplace less well equipped in the art of written communication, the influx of multicultural (and multilingual) ppl onto the marketplace and the internationalism of business today, spelling and grammar just isnt so important as issue generally so long as the contents is understandable. I am of course not advocating or condoning sloppy english, dumbing down of official report writing or promoting anarchy in the art of written communications, but being pragmatic.
to be honest, to insist on maintaining linguistic standards which will impinge on ppls' wish to contribute will adversly screen the actual contributers , thus distorting the ethos of 'freedom of expression' we should encourage in our society - and is probably a result of either someone cocooned in a closed institution or just someone who doesnt meet enough ppl.

/forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif
 
I don't give a tinkers fart about your spelling or about your grammar, it's the content we or rather I'm interested in. By the way for that other poster Powerskipper is also dyslexic, but she seems to do OK, Doesn't she?
 
Re: Ah!...Prescriptivist v Descriptivist - suggested reading...

Thanks for that Domlee, they sound really interesting reads...

This discussion is one of the more interesting non sailing threads on here is ages....

Nice to know that we are capable of having intelligent conversation (and there, without thinking, i've described this as conversation - i rest my case) about subjects other than fox hunting.....
 
I have never been good at spelling, and going into engineering at the tender age of 16 was not very good at report writing etc a classic techincal engineers failing in the UK
The Engineering Council as was recognised this and before you were registered as a Chartered Engineer you had to pass ' Engineer in Society' as one of the six technical subjects ( my others were Dynamics of Mech systems, Thermodynamics, Heat and Mass Transfer, Fluid Mechcanics and Operational Research for anyboby bored enough to be interested). It was a real struggle to pass all these in one go, 13 out of c500 in my year including myself, (which was not too bad for a dummy who left school at 16 and had not passed his 11+), but interestingly those doing the MSC university route still had to pass the Engineer in Society subject.
So I hope my mispelling is not viewed as being too unaccptable and I still not understand why I still automatically put a D in Granville etc
 
Re: Ah!...Prescriptivist v Descriptivist - suggested reading...

While I've got a spare few minutes before work kicks off....

My job involves me in helping the largest of large organisations understand how to use and manage ENORMOUS quantities of data..... and I am talking enormous, here... several of my clients have operations in 65 countries, and have typically 2 to 3 Petabytes of data per country.... for those not aware of Petabytes, its a 1000 Terabytes, where a Terabyte is a 1000 Gigabytes..... if you can't visualise that, imagine that its a room with 1 Million PC's in it, all with full hard drives or as much information as the entire set of home PC's of Greater London....

Did you know that globally we have generated as much data in the last 2 years, as we have in its entirety up to that point?

So the first major challenge will not be 'is it correcttly constructed', but how on earth do I find what I need?

The second major challenge will be, how do I get the information I need, as I am now too busy/innundated to find the time to sit down and read it.....

Already organisations are using concept aware search technology, that use Artificial Intelligence to learn about what I am looking for, and can for example tell the difference between a word document that is a legal contract, and perhaps a letter.... and can align that knowledege with my job role, and more interestingly with my personality... ie help me find documents that are most aligned with my personal reading style, or my preferences for content presentation....this will help us to search and categorise our content more intelliently... it even becomes intelligent to the form of doing 'newsletters' based pon what it knows about us.. finding documents that might interest us, or engaging us in discussions via e-mail, phone, txt or web in which we have knowldge or can add value...

Secondly, and perhaps slightly more developed, is the ability to present content in an appropriate manner. I am working on systems with more than one organisation that acheive something very interesting....

When someone request information, such, lets say a word doc, it will firstly look in their electronic (Outlook) diary to see where they are (called presence management).... if they are office based it will e-mail it to them... if they are mobile, and logged on via a wireless network, or perhaps a mobile, it will send a synopsis, it can also dictate it to them over their phone via text to speech, and can even re-write it in txt format, and send it via SMS..... soon this will have the ability for documents to be video, graphic, or text, and will manage the distribution via many different mechanisms.....
None of this is Science Fiction... these technologies are being used, and real value is being driven from them.... it is only a matter of time before these technologies are 'consumerised', and start appearing at home... and altready the telcos are re-engineering their networls to cope with this shifting emphasis of usage of infrastructure...

This is the world of our children.... the 24/7 on-demand society... what the analysts call the Real Time world......

'Times they are a changing' as someone once sang......

Sorry if i'm preaching a little, or coming across as a bit obsessive, but this really is a pet subject of mine... one that intrigues me... and I suspect many others on this forum... its really exciting to be in the front seats at the time of a 'cultural revolution' (with apologies to fans of Chairman Mao!)
 
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