The decay of English--blamed on bloggers!

[marko_the_rat]

My work's office newsletter pulled up this tidbit from the 1 May 2006 edition of the Guardian: Internet culture spells doom for strait-laced orthographers

The Oxford English Corpus has found that "dozens of traditional phrases are now more commonly misspelled than rendered correctly in written English [on the internet]." Looking through the list, I find to my shame I am guilty of some of these infractions myself.

But I remain philosophical about it, as English is a living language that will keep evolving and changing for many decades to come. I only really rankle at manglings of English that don't make sense, like the greengrocer's apostrophe. I'm seeing more and more incorrect English creep into newspapers (who needs proofreaders when you have computers?) and while it annoys me it's important that I remind myself that

I

am rapidly becoming the one guilty of misusing English, because I'm not keeping up with changes through common usage.

Comments

[maddogairpirate.livejournal.com]

Eh, many of those 'mistakes' existed long before the internet became widespread.

I've been spelling it just desserts for years. Then again, I always took the meaning to be something a person would have to eat, much like crow or humble pie.

My guess is while a few of those aren't in the Oxford dictionary, others may have the allegedly incorrect spellings. I should check some of them out in Merriam-Webster.

[harvardheinous.livejournal.com]

No wai!   I never realized the correct word was "deserts" (as opposed to "desserts") until now!   Thanks!

[savant-da-rat.livejournal.com]

I'm just as guilty. Oh well :)