Thursday, June 13, 2013

Twitter giving English a bad name

Posted by Katina at 8:00 PM

"One in every 150 English words posted on Twitter is spelt incorrectly, with missing apostrophes the most common grammar crime."

A statistic that is not surprising, but still pretty detrimental to the English language.

Part of my job as a sub-editor is proofing copy, and among that knowing things like my its vs it's and making corrections. I'm not flawless with this (to be fair, no one is), but I'm pretty damn good. And I get really annoyed when people get these things wrong. English isn't an easy language, but native speakers should have it down by the time they're out of year 2.

Other unnecessary apostrophes - no excuse. Sadly, I'm pretty sure I sent a page at work a couple of days ago only to see it had been changed and an apostrophe placed in a word (not its/it's) incorrectly by the time I got to putting it online. Deary me.

As a heavy Twitter user, it will be admitted that like the Telegraph (UK) article I got this information from says, I understand how easy it is to want to abbreviate.

I do a lot of the time - if I'm really stuck I'll go half text-speak and say 2 instead of two/to/too. But not at the expense of leaving apostrophes out. If I know it's not happening, I just cut crap or split my thought into two separate posts.

Not that difficult for others, surely?

The article also said:

Twitter recently announced it counts an average of 400 million tweets posted by users every day, but it fared worst among all social networks for the quality of spelling and grammar.

Even U2 can't escape misspelt posts. Courtesy CBC

So does that mean Twitter is soon to evolve into a feed of text speak? It doesn't feel that way just yet, but I fear it. There is so good that can come out of using it.

What would it mean for English though? If it's going the way a Oxford professor thinks, things are not good:

Simon Horobin, an English professor at Magdalen College, Oxford, suggested they’re, their and there could be spelt in the same way. Prof Horobin said: "I am not saying we should just spell freely, but sometimes we have to accept spellings change".

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Everything I ever worried about turned out exactly as it was going to despite my anxious moments to the contrary.

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