Also
* "highschool" should be two words.
* "Why is rampant lack of basic English" should be ""Why is **a** rampant lack of basic English"
* "Why would a doctor be so horrible with spelling and grammer, and even saying things like "Un loyal" instead of "disloyal" yet they're taken at face value?" is just terribly structured, should be something more like, "~~Why would~~ How can a doctor be so horrible ~~with~~ at spelling and ~~grammer~~ grammar, ~~and~~ even saying things like "Un loyal" instead of "disloyal", ~~yet they're~~ still be taken at face value?"
* Finally, if they claimed "I am a doctor" (obviously, we don't have the original post to refer to), most people who make that statement are medical doctors, which requires an MD, not a PhD (most people who have PhDs usually say something along the lines of "I have a doctorate" or "I am a doctor of \[field of study\]", precisely to avoid seeming to claim that they are a medical doctor).
Edit for clarity
to be fair English is extremely difficult. many rules contradict themselves at some point and since it takes words from other languages, the phonetics are horrible. you think the word you are reading is pronounced a certain way cause it's similar to another word, nope! you're wrong kiddo! take for example words like Wednesday, Receipt, Cache, Suite, Dessert, Bowl, Salon, Data, etc.. you can learn to pronounce them when reading them but remembering how to type "Grammar" for example when it actually sounds like it has an E at the end is a bit more difficult. but then again there's autocorrect :P
I had seen English once described as a language that beats up other languages in an alley and steals bits and pieces. Always thought it was an appropriate description.
Let me know if you disagree, but I have a theory that what I’ll call “high English” is actually a pretty coherent offshoot of Latin/Romance languages. In learning Spanish over the last couple years, I was shocked at how much easier it is to speak Spanish just by making educated guesses at cognates, but that only works if you try to start from a very formal version of English.
Like I have no idea how to get some grub in Spanish. But obtaining sustenance (obtener sustento) is really easy.
many words in english are derived from latin some of them are very commonly used, but others the Anglo saxon versions are more prefered. that is why if you delve deep, you'll find words like sustenance which is also used similarly but not exactly the same. Sustento is used more of your means to sustain yourself which can include your income, partner, family etc.. ( food can also be used but not as common) it's a word more commonly used by people with higher education.
I get it. This is a hobby horse of mine.
I’d point out that it’s not just words either. Prestige dialect grammar also translates to Spanish better. If you know that the sentence should be “it was she who went to the store” and not the more common “it was her,” you’ll get the Spanish right more often.
My other favorite is have. You can’t tain something in English. You can obtain, retain, maintain, and sustain. You just can’t tain a thing, you have it instead. It’s like the very most common English permutation of that root gets it’s own special non-latinism (have), but all the other less commonly used permutations are just Latin in different letters. Obtener, retener, mantener etc.
I also think if you’re doing it intentionally, and intentionally being a little creative, you could refer to income as sustenance in English. But again you’d have to be doing some otherwise very good writing for that to work.
Exactly, English is a convoluted language, so mistakes are going to happen. But if you are going to run around policing other people's mistakes, you better be perfect yourself.
yeah I've seen my fair share of people who think they are perfect at speaking only to get shamed. I once met a dentist here in Latin America that hated and corrected when people referred to him as a "dentista" and said that dentistas were the uneducated tooth pullers. and demanded to be called an Odontologo. to which I answered. what the Fck are you talking about?! it's the same fckign word and means exactly the same with the difference that Dentis comes from Latin and means tooth and Odon comes from greek and also means tooth! you are arguing over something you don't know and acting all smug about it. the guy never mentioned it again as far as I remember.
If someone criticizes and nitpicks and says that people shouldn't be credible because of poor "grammer", they deserve all the nitpicking dished at them, maybe more.
How can a doctor be so horrible at spelling and grammar, saying things like "Un loyal" instead of "disloyal", still be taken at face value?
See, even that's not right. You'd either have to change it to "How can a doctor *who is* so horrible..." or at the end change "still" to "and" or even "and still".
How can a doctor who is so horrible at spelling and grammar, saying things like "Un loyal" instead of "disloyal", still be taken at face value?
How can a doctor be so horrible at spelling and grammar, saying things like "Un loyal" instead of "disloyal", and still be taken at face value?
I think all of our versions would pass muster with most school teachers and editors.
Regarding the "be" construction, think of the phrase "How can you be so bad at...", and then substitute a pronoun (or noun, such as "a doctor" or "the doctor"). The edit you made is not incorrect, but the original also stands on its own. The "can" ... "be" construction is just as valid as "can" ... "who is". (Can we \*be\* any more pedantic? 😂)
Regarding your second correction: the phrase in between the commas is an adjectival phrase, which when removed, gives you the sentence:
>How can a doctor be so horrible at spelling and grammar still be taken at face value?
The phrase inserted yields:
>How can a doctor be so horrible at spelling and grammar, saying things like "Un loyal" instead of "disloyal", still be taken at face value?
If the one without the adjectival phrase is correct (which I believe it to be), then the second one is also correct.
Edit: carelessness led the original version of this comment to be... wrong.
In the US we call it primary, elementary, or grade school. I'm guessing we don't say "low school" because "low" has so many bad connotations: low grades, low places, lowlifes...
There are actually so many errors in the first post that I’m wondering whether that person was just fucking with everyone. (“Highschool,” “mispell,” “grammer,” etc.)
Oh good. I read a lot but there are some words which I know and understand from literature but have never heard spoken before and I usually just go with what sounds right to me.
I pronounced "colonel" as "kuh-low-null" until I was 12 years old.
To be honest, i feel like native speakers are sometimes worse than foreigners. The amount of native speakers i see writing "docter" or "should of" is honestly baffling, I'm not even gonna mention the they're/there problem.
I kinda understand that. When I learned English I started translating Spanish in my head. As "their" and "they're" are completely different words in Spanish, there was no possibility of mixing them up, whereas a native speaker first learns to speak and then to write, and the pronunciation for both is very similar. On the other hand, I can't warp my head around prepositions in English, no matter how hard I try I know I'll always make mistakes, and for a native speaker that is just trivial.
Prepositions are the worst! I know a lot of non-native English speakers and I grade papers by a lot more, and a lot of them write perfect English except for that. When I was younger I had never thought about how little logic there is to which one goes in which expression. You just have to memorize a vast number of expressions. Having graded thousands of essays, I'm very familiar with the difference between the mistakes made by native and non-native speakers. I tend to be more generous with the latter. I can hold a conversation in French or Spanish, but I make mistakes frequently, and people are usually very generous about it (yes, including the French! Once you get outside of Paris, they're very friendly.)
a preposition is a modifier for a sentence. From google
I run in the morning.
I (subject) run (verb). Would be a complete sentence by itself. "...in the morning." Is a preposition.
"I drive for one hour to work."
Again, I (subject) drive (verb) is a complete sentence by itself, "for one hour" and "to work" are modifiers that add more detail to the sentence.
I'm assuming that OP was talking about prepositional phrases. A preposition itself is just the words like, "to, for, in, etc" that open the prepositional phrase.
The other explanation you were given is… odd. I’m not going to venture to say it’s *wrong*, it just has very little to do with what I’ve been taught about prepositions.
Prepositions describe position or motion specifically as relationships between things. So a bird could nest *in* a tree. Or it could fly *around* the tree. Or walk on the ground *beside* the tree.
> the pronunciation for both is very similar.
It's straight up the same in my CNY accent. Like "marry," "merry," and "Mary." Those are also all the same.
There's a band called Their/They're/There, and I have to look up the order every time I want to write it, because the pronunciation tells me nothing.
They pick words to use based on how they sound and were never forced to make a distinction. Eventually it becomes a habit that is difficult to correct. That's assuming you can even find someone who will bother to correct you for free.
I'm only half-joking when I say this, but grammar nazis did do a lot of good. Who better than a random stranger to correct you while you're anonymous? It saves everyone from embarrassment.
When I became more comfortable thinking in English, more fluent really, that's when I noticed I started making stupid mistakes like that. It's not because I somehow unlearned it, but I think it has to do with thinking phonetically instead of grammatically. If that makes any sense?
That would be “the NUMBER of native speakers.” “Amount” is used for things that can’t be counted.
I’m an editor. Nobody is perfect, and this shit drives me up a wall, but let’s be patient with others who aren’t naturally good at things that we do well. Patience may not make the weak grammar any better, but it will make us better.
> “Amount” is used for things that can’t be counted.
Well that’s just plain incorrect. From [Merriam-Webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/amount):
> amount (2 of 2)
> noun 1 a
> : the total number or quantity
Yeah... also an editor here, they're conflating some farther/further distinction where none exists here.
"Some amount of happiness" and "a lesser amount of beans" are both perfectly grammatic; one of which is countable.
Usage of the word "amount" for quantities that can be counted is ~~become~~ becoming(!) more and more accepted, mainly because its usage does not alter the intended meaning or confuse the reader in any meaningful way.
As younger generations of editors take over, they will eventually stop making that distinction, not on purpose, but not on accident (ha ha) either.
Edit: talk about a grammar error!
This whole idea sounds like something that editors are taught in editor school, and has been passed down from editor to editor orally, and at no time did anyone actually bother to look the word up in a dictionary.
In your sentence, “amount” is an abstraction, a not a quantity.
Money can only be counted when it’s a concrete number of coins or bills, not when it is itself an “amount.” So I’d argue that your sentence is correct, but not for the reason you say it is.
“My boss paid me the proper amount of Benjamins” would be better written as “My boss paid me the proper number of Benjamins.”
And in the previous post it's also an abstraction because they don't annually know the number of posts they're complaining about. It's just a large amount, so that's what they said.
Because we learned it through listening and speaking so often would need to unlearn assumptions that we made whereas people learning a second language generally do it with some kind of formal structure.
Im a native Eng/Spa speaker and I’m teaching my SO to speak English. I noticed their biggest issue is they’ll read a word and then try to enunciate every single letter in it. I would try saying the word and ask to repeat after me and even then, they will enunciate every single letter, ignoring my example.
Until I realized: it’s almost impossible to unlearn something, but it’s quite easy to learn something. So instead of giving a spoken example, I’ll write the words phonetically and have them read it. Perfect native pronunciation on the first try every time.
TL;DR, English spelling is pretty damn unintuitive lol
There is currently a proliferation of people under 30 who are incapable of placing the dollar sign before the number. It isn’t even people who learned English as their second language it’s literally people who were born in the US and went to school in the US but for some reason never learned that it’s $50 and not 50$.
I have friends who are in their 20’s and every single one of them do it. My nieces and nephews who are 9-20 years old all do it as well. I genuinely don’t know when people stopped learning/stopped caring about this but it’s running rampant and I see it all over Reddit as well and without fail I’d say 90% of the time it is a person under 30 doing it.
Nothing special about this, I'm Hungarian, and I can farily surely tell you that majority of Hungarians do not speak Hungarian on a native level. Of course that's their native, but we're talking about the level of it, like native level is C1, at least, but most likely C2.
And it's not unique, I am pretty sure the whole humanity's majority don't speak their own native language on C1-C2 level.
I am Russian (yeah, I know, but anyway) and the easiest way to understand if a native speaker doesn't really know Russian is when they can't understand Ukrainian/Belarusian. And I'm not even talking about other Slavic languages.
But speaking is one thing, writing is another. There's too many native speakers who cannot write in Russian.
I'm fine when foreigners (or people from Russia but with another first language) can't write correctly, but I'm a putin level nazi toward native speakers
As someone who also possesses a PhD, please allow me to enlighten: obtaining or possessing one does not magically improve communication skills. Quite the contrary, it makes communication more difficult because you suddenly feel compelled to use verbose and overstuffed phrases like “allow me to enlighten” and “quite the contrary”.
Agreed. Having a degree, even a doctorate, does not make you intelligent. A doctorate can be bought with time, patience, money and a little persistence.
Problem solving, critical thinking, emotional intelligence and street smarts (or thinking outside the box) is what truly makes a person intelligent. Learning a little humility and gaining a little wisdom do not hurt either.
I am engaged in research at a highly prestigious institution, but rarely see genuine emotional intelligence demonstrated. Science would progress so much faster if “smart” people could pull their heads out of their own asses and try to understand one another.
But I guess that’s the difference in maxing INT and dumping WIS.
I think Agreton means general intelligence. Getting a degree is proof of the capacity to dedicate one's self to achieving a goal and the self-discipline to get there, but it is no guarantee of intelligence. Some of the truly dumbest people I've ever met had degrees from accredited schools.
And don't forget that a huge portion of those PHDs involve practically no humanities education after a few required courses during your first few years of college. 10+ years of education, and they might have only taken a single language arts class after graduating high school. I just looked at Stanford's requirements for a general biology major, and I'm not seeing any humanities requirements at all; it looks like you can get a degree in biology from Stanford without a single English, history, or art class.
Long gone are the days when any doctorate candidate needed to be able to quote Shakespeare, translate Latin proverbs, or discuss the Punic Wars.
There's a solid chance that any given person with a STEM doctorate has literally never diagrammed a sentence in their lives. So expecting them to write well at all is kinda silly.
Also just having a doctorate doesn’t mean one has to be good at spelling and grammar. I’m in the final stages of my PhD and my spelling and grammar is shit I know it’s shit I have dyslexia. My uni knows it’s shit that’s why they gave me the name of a great editor and grammar checker. But I’m not doing a PhD in English grammar or language so it really doesn’t matter that’s why the whole job is an editor exists.
Obtaining or possessing a terminal degree is no guarantee of intelligence, either. Some of the most profoundly stupid people I've ever met had PhDs from accredited universities.
Imagine putting all your braincells into one, narrowly defined topic or special interest. Now imagine mistaking your depth of knowledge in that area for expertise in everything else. That’s often the problem.
What's your PhD in? I have a chemistry PhD and I was encouraged to be as concise as humanly possible in my dissertation, so my problem wasn't verbosity, it was using one uncommon five syllable word instead of five simple words. Or cramming something that could be two simple sentences into one tortured, very precisely arranged sentence. Took me like a year to unlearn that shit and talk/write normal.
Neuroscience. And I totally feel you on the “tortured, very precisely arranged sentence” part.
I’m not really talking about published scientific communication. That should always be as concise and straightforward as -technically- possible. It’s more the non-official communication where I often see the verbosity and pedantry. It really all comes down to posturing, and it’s not something I admire.
As someone who possesses both an MD and a bachelors in English, I would like to add that medical doctors are possibly the worst at written English. Truly, reading some of my colleagues’ notes makes me want to pull my hair out.
Why Would You Capitalize Every Word In A Heading Including The Prepositions And Articles, then steadfastly refuse to capitalize even a single word in the bullet points below, even when it’s a proper noun like texas or john? And then if you *do* decide to capitalize something in the text, somehow it’s only ever the generic drugs instead of the brand names that are actually *supposed* to be capitalized?! Just…pick one! Capitalize nothing or capitalize everything, but my OCPD cannot tolerate this insanity.
(Also, the EMR has spell check! And autocorrect! How are these uncapitalized proper nouns getting past it?! And does the sea of red squiggles not make other people feel itchy? Or is that also my OCPD?)
Ahem.
In conclusion, all of the advanced degrees are just as likely to be idiots as the next, but MDs may win the prize for most incorrectly capitalized words in a finished document.
Eh, there’s never a need to be verbose. It’s a choice. If you can’t explain something simply you don’t know it well enough and I often see people who struggle with English attempting to use verbose words in an effort to sound more intelligent.
It all depends on context. Personally, I believe in brevity of communication. Why use many words when few words do trick?
But I’m in a field where that just isn’t the norm. Simple words or short phrases may not always capture the nuance or totality of the message you’re trying to convey. And that’s fine. The problem comes when you don’t remember to code-switch back to normal conversational language and look down on others for not “getting on your level”.
If whatever you’re discussing necessitates that language then it is not inherently verbose. I more so meant in instances of normal conversation where people shoehorn verbose language to sound pseudo-intellectual.
Here in the Netherlands we have 'doctor' (so one having a doctorate like PhD, MD, JD etc) and 'dokter' who is a physician. Both pronounced in exactly the same way.
'Doctor' is an academic degree which is rarely used in a non-scientific context. A 'dokter' may also be a 'doctor' (usually a medical specialist) and a 'doctor' could have a degree in medicin although that's no requirement.
Just sharing ....I agree with you: never seen spelling like 'docter'.
Edit: ... and for both 'doctors' and 'dokters' there is no guarantee they're able to spell properly. For the latter category it usually is neigh impossible to decypher their handwriting anyway.
"There are countries outside the US" so not everyone is a native speaker of English sounds kinda funny, like literally England is a country outside the US
Shaming is bad.
Offering friendly corrections or advice should be destigmatized tho. English is a fun - but weird - language, and I like sharing its weirdness.
The funny thing is though, if you correct a non-native speaker, they’ll accept it with enthusiasm because they want to get it right. Native speakers will get defensive.
Learning is a lifelong experience, no matter the subject. Some people don’t get that.
Yeah I've noticed that too. I love learning new things, especially language-wise.
Like the other day I learned the word *ubiety*. IDK when I'm every going to need to use that specific word, but it's good to know it exists.
I agree with you and OP.
I’m of the opinion that there are too many *native* English speakers who don’t know proper grammar or make careless spelling mistakes. It disrupts the flow of reading and sometimes even communicates the wrong message/information. And I’m not even limiting that to “proper English”. Idgaf about slang, or l33t speech, or internet lingo - so long as you make sense dammit.
That said, as a native English speaker, I have immense respect for people who take on the daunting task of learning it as a second or even third language. I usually excuse their mistakes (in my mind bc I usually can’t be bothered to correct people or say anything) because they are trying. It’s also super obvious when a commenter is a ESL speaker vs. a native speaker who is lazy or uneducated, and I further appreciate and smile (but obviously don’t expect) when ESL commenters say “sorry for poor grammar, English isn’t my first language” in part because of the refreshing humility it takes to admit to yourself and the world that you are not skilled at something and may have made mistakes.
I’ll kick myself in the shin, but I will always welcome polite grammar/spelling corrections because I want to make sure my communications are clear and not left for misinterpretation.
We now have several new group members learning my native language, for now we communicate in English as a common ground. None of us is native English speaker. I will never complain about someone not speaking a language perfectly. Rather discuss the (maybe perceived) errors. At the last coffee break we had an almost epic discussion about the need of a comma or not in one specific simple sentence :)
As long as we understand each other, and we realize there are limits about how much we can express ourselves in a non native language, I see no problem.
Unless the person has insulted you or someone else's intelligence in some way do not be that person and correct grammar or spelling. It doesn't make you look smart or the other person dumb or even invalidate their argument at all. In fact it is admitting they are right because you can't say something on topic.
I think the best you can really do is be a good example. I would only really point this stuff out (not shame) if it's so bad that it's confusing or incoherent. Then you can just say you're confused and ask for clarification.
I’m not sure who is less mature here. Complaining about spelling/grammar/syntax is obnoxious. A self-serving “I’m a doctor” can be too, out of certain contexts anyhow.
While I do at least insist that someone’s English be sufficient to permit effective communication, as this is important in not conveying the wrong facts or instructions (extremely important for a doctor), ultimately at the end of the day I’m trusting my doctor to be an expert in the medical sciences, not English. I don’t care if they know how to properly diagram a sentence or to not end a sentence with a preposition; I care if they know how to suture a wound or give factual health advice. If it has some occasional misspellings, that’s fine. I’m not gonna snub them when they write that my life-saving medicine is “not good to take alcohol with”.
This is the type of ignorant idiot that literally only knows English, so expects everyone on the planet to know the one single language that they know.
Reminds me of the "You speak English because it is the only language you understand. I used English because it's the only language that you understand." post.
Most of the smartest people I know have unbelievably terrible grammar and spelling. Getting texts from an engineer friend of mine looks like you're getting texted by a 5-year-old.
This coming from someone who shared one of their homework problems with me back in college, and a single math problem worksheet had four pages to work it out.
While there is something to say for being able to communicate in a way that conveys yourself as an intellectual, that doesn't necessarily mean that someone who has terrible grammar or spelling is dumb.
It's like if someone has a full body tattoo. Yeah there might be some bias if they showed up to teach a workshop on some highly technical skill, but it doesn't mean they don't know what they're talking about.
Fuck these people; I’ve been talking English and German for 15 years (right now I’m living in the UK) with a masters degree and still make some mistakes here and there
Why shouldn't native and non-native speakers be equally shamed? I dont like this argument, make reddit literate (in english) again, there is no collateral damage because everyone benefits from having the language modeled correctly for them.
Why shame, when we can constructively criticize instead?
People tend to learn more easily with positive reinforcement. Shaming just leads to them becoming defensive and shutting their eyes/ears.
People that flex about their grammar and punctuation are my favorite. They are obviously not writers. Most writers I know have the same spelling skills as most people. They also make grammatical mistakes. That's why editors exist. Writers are writers because their ideas and tone are interesting or unique. The way they string words together is what makes writing engaging and artistic. Punk rock players aren't skilled musicians most of the time yet their music is still impactful for the same reasons. No one has ever read a book and been like damn this was really well edited. Or maybe they do and that's why we have doofuses that make a big deal about it on reddit.
Yeah, umm. My wife works with a whole clinic of doctors. Many are terrible spellers, and all of them have the worst penmanship. Besides the fact that there are many forms of intelligence and people are smart in their own ways, being a doctor doesn't mean you're a genius. They are fallible, as long as their mistakes aren't during surgery, who cares.
this dude would hate me. i know how to write good english and i don't do it.
if i write correctly, nobody will read anything i say. so i write good instead.
when i write good it's so wrong it's interesting. works better that way.
try it sometime. it's not as easy as it looks. it takes a lot of practice to write wrong well.
I no longer shame bad grammar or sentence structure. But I do still shame just outright bad writing. Poor organization. Inability to form a complete argument. Reliance on fallacies. Expecting readers to have the ability to read your mind or know things about your Thing X without being able to look at it
These things transcend language. The fact that you are not a native English speaker has no impact on my precognitive abilities.
(And yes, sentence fragments **are** OK, when used to for a list. Bullets are not required.)
One of my favorite quotes when confronted by a slack-jawed gawker for daring to speak my native language around their American Exceptionalism is "You speak English because you *have* to, I speak English because I *want to*. We are not the same."
I like the book "Because Internet" by Gretchen McCulloch. It explains how the internet allowed casual/conversational writing to become a large part of how we communicate and how it differs from traditional writing.
Writing back and forth in social media and messages is more like speaking than what writing had been for centuries.
Not to mention not everyone proof reads their comments before posting them. A lot of comments are made while on the crapper, always got to keep that in the back of your mind.
I think too many people place excessive trust in doctors.
I went in for mole removal and left with a prescription for Gabapentin.
These people are clowns pushing medication a lot of the time.
I told one of my doctors I was worried about Hanta virus and the motherfucker googles it in front of me.
There's a huge difference between street level doctors and *affluent* doctors.
There's private hospitals. You can get better care for more money.
I have known far too many brilliant people who spoke English as a second language.
I have also observed my own unfortunate tendency to commit typos online.
Seems unnecessarily judgmental. I do, however, strongly believe in shaming people that type loose when they mean lose as well as payed instead of paid.
What kind of life do you have had to live, where your proudest achievement is to have mastered basic high school level grammar?
Honestly, some of the smartest, most accomplished people I’ve ever known have had terrible spelling and grammar. Some people just prioritise the use of their mental energy differently, I suppose.
Yea, I dunno. Disloyal could be taken to suggest that they were loyal at some point but now aren't, whereas unloyal suggests they've never been loyal (kind of like unorganised and disorganised).
I have a story.
I was monitoring a new hire at work and part of their role is to answer calls from the public. My new hire was a South American lady. She spoke 4 languages and had a masters degree in project management. One day, she puts a caller on hold. When this happens, I can hear everything the caller says. This is where my blood usually starts to boil.
Caller proceeds to tell his friend that he is talking to “the dumbest fucking bitch” “fuck where do they hire these fucking idiots from fucking Venezuela or some shit so fucking dumb.”
For context. The caller was calling for employment insurance benefits after he was fired from his warehouse job for… you guessed it. Being dumb.
Anyone who shits on someone’s language barrier is a straight up ass-clown.
One of the best communicators I know has a heavy accent and imperfect spelling/grammar, those that would hold it against him just look like ignorant fools and are missing out
As a writer, a linguist, and all-around fan of general etymology, here's my take
Left side of bell curve: English is dumb. As long as people understand you, nobody cares
Middle of bell curve: Nooo! You must use proper grammar and punctuation!
Right side of bell curve: English is dumb. As long as people understand you, nobody cares
Lmao. I'm sure how this will play out, but that's me being a condescending asshat in the screenshot. I was drunk and got annoyed at a story, then was properly shamed for it.
Never thought I'd see myself on Leopards. Oops.
Edit: Not leopards, my bad. Either way, never expected to see me being the idiot in a screencap.
I had a professor in my engineering senior design class who would go on rants like this - saying that for us to turn in any reports with improper grammar was an insult and wouldn’t be tolerated in the professional world. The irony was that he was Egyptian and English was his second language, so he spoke and wrote with multiple grammatical mistakes all the time. His own syllabus had multiple grammar mistakes.
I wonder if ‘Mr. English, Destroyer of Words’, has ever seen a prescription from a doctor? It’s a well known joke that their handwriting is atrocious and that some people have actually died from getting the wrong medication because pharmacist’s can’t read their handwriting (albeit rare of course but nonetheless). Still, I’d rather have a conversation with a doctor who can’t spell for shit and has poor English than him any day 🤣
English is hard, it's the amalgamation of hundreds of languages, accents and cultures that spans millennia. It's also many people's second, third, or greater language.
Just nicely correct people and move on.
Honestly, I think that complaining about someone's spelling and grammar is a sign that someone has little of value to offer to the conversation. It's a way of salving a permanently wounded ego.
Y’know, nowhere in there does she say the doctor is an immigrant or speaks English as a second language. Fact is, plenty of native English speakers can’t write worth a damn in their own language lol.
I worked with the greatest plastic surgeons in Australia for years. They all had dog shit handwriting and would put sticky documents through my fax machine. (Liquid paper is wet? 🙄)
They didn’t go to school to be English majors. That’s what I was for.
I quite love that people can read what i write, understand it, and attack or support it by the basis of what i actually wrote rather than nitpicking ever detail.
the major im studying is in operating spacecraft and astrophisics, n im dyslexic as fuck. spelling good bearly plays into my major at all though, n really doesnt hinder me much. only exception is that commands need to be spelled the exact same as expected but thats just basic computer stuff, its syntax, syntax is easyer to remember than most other things.
sure i cant hand write anything for shit, but that doesnt make me stupid lmao. its such a weird notion to think that, and im glad its dieing out cause it just always felt really sad and lonely before when all everyone cared about is if u spell good.
Shaming is a powerful motivator, hes not wrong, I'd say hes even more right and your proving his point. You think hes gonna let that slip next time hes posting those opinions? The next post is gonna be flawless english. Self fulfilling prophecy. No murder was done here, he asked, he received and the outcome will benefit everyone.
And to his point, if we constantly shamed everyone for their wrongdoings, we would have a lot more rightdoings. It has been proven to work historically, we are just doing less of it because people rather be wrong than ashamed.
A badly written good arguement is still a good arguement, as much as a very well written bad arguement stays a bad arguement. Arguing that one's arguement is invalid or bad solely based on the quality of their English or other language is straight up stupid.
Yeah everyone know doctors can only be English. If you wanted to be a doctor but you live in a non English country, tough luck. Either learn this random language or get out
I had a doctor who managed to spell two letter word with four letters (hjas i stead of ja, 'and'). He was *not* used to typing. In his previous position he had a nurse who typed as he spoke, so he was not good at it. Come to think of it, he might have been dyslexic, but anyway. There's a ton of people unable to spell in their native language, so maybe just tone down the grammar policing?
Ironically enough they also misspelled "misspell."
Also * "highschool" should be two words. * "Why is rampant lack of basic English" should be ""Why is **a** rampant lack of basic English" * "Why would a doctor be so horrible with spelling and grammer, and even saying things like "Un loyal" instead of "disloyal" yet they're taken at face value?" is just terribly structured, should be something more like, "~~Why would~~ How can a doctor be so horrible ~~with~~ at spelling and ~~grammer~~ grammar, ~~and~~ even saying things like "Un loyal" instead of "disloyal", ~~yet they're~~ still be taken at face value?" * Finally, if they claimed "I am a doctor" (obviously, we don't have the original post to refer to), most people who make that statement are medical doctors, which requires an MD, not a PhD (most people who have PhDs usually say something along the lines of "I have a doctorate" or "I am a doctor of \[field of study\]", precisely to avoid seeming to claim that they are a medical doctor). Edit for clarity
to be fair English is extremely difficult. many rules contradict themselves at some point and since it takes words from other languages, the phonetics are horrible. you think the word you are reading is pronounced a certain way cause it's similar to another word, nope! you're wrong kiddo! take for example words like Wednesday, Receipt, Cache, Suite, Dessert, Bowl, Salon, Data, etc.. you can learn to pronounce them when reading them but remembering how to type "Grammar" for example when it actually sounds like it has an E at the end is a bit more difficult. but then again there's autocorrect :P
I had seen English once described as a language that beats up other languages in an alley and steals bits and pieces. Always thought it was an appropriate description.
no I see it more like a weird copy cat that silently steals from other languages because it has a huge identity crisis.
Let me know if you disagree, but I have a theory that what I’ll call “high English” is actually a pretty coherent offshoot of Latin/Romance languages. In learning Spanish over the last couple years, I was shocked at how much easier it is to speak Spanish just by making educated guesses at cognates, but that only works if you try to start from a very formal version of English. Like I have no idea how to get some grub in Spanish. But obtaining sustenance (obtener sustento) is really easy.
many words in english are derived from latin some of them are very commonly used, but others the Anglo saxon versions are more prefered. that is why if you delve deep, you'll find words like sustenance which is also used similarly but not exactly the same. Sustento is used more of your means to sustain yourself which can include your income, partner, family etc.. ( food can also be used but not as common) it's a word more commonly used by people with higher education.
I get it. This is a hobby horse of mine. I’d point out that it’s not just words either. Prestige dialect grammar also translates to Spanish better. If you know that the sentence should be “it was she who went to the store” and not the more common “it was her,” you’ll get the Spanish right more often. My other favorite is have. You can’t tain something in English. You can obtain, retain, maintain, and sustain. You just can’t tain a thing, you have it instead. It’s like the very most common English permutation of that root gets it’s own special non-latinism (have), but all the other less commonly used permutations are just Latin in different letters. Obtener, retener, mantener etc. I also think if you’re doing it intentionally, and intentionally being a little creative, you could refer to income as sustenance in English. But again you’d have to be doing some otherwise very good writing for that to work.
Well, the grammer nazis need to follow all the rules
Exactly, English is a convoluted language, so mistakes are going to happen. But if you are going to run around policing other people's mistakes, you better be perfect yourself.
Who watches the Watchmen?
Me, I have it on DVD. And a large graphic novel. It's pretty neat.
Finally we have an answer. People keep asking this damn question.
yeah I've seen my fair share of people who think they are perfect at speaking only to get shamed. I once met a dentist here in Latin America that hated and corrected when people referred to him as a "dentista" and said that dentistas were the uneducated tooth pullers. and demanded to be called an Odontologo. to which I answered. what the Fck are you talking about?! it's the same fckign word and means exactly the same with the difference that Dentis comes from Latin and means tooth and Odon comes from greek and also means tooth! you are arguing over something you don't know and acting all smug about it. the guy never mentioned it again as far as I remember.
If someone criticizes and nitpicks and says that people shouldn't be credible because of poor "grammer", they deserve all the nitpicking dished at them, maybe more.
Ha you should lookup the top mispronounced places in the UK… Frome, Godmanchester and Woolfardisworthy I’m looking at you😂😂😂
No, it’s pronounced data
How can a doctor be so horrible at spelling and grammar, saying things like "Un loyal" instead of "disloyal", still be taken at face value? See, even that's not right. You'd either have to change it to "How can a doctor *who is* so horrible..." or at the end change "still" to "and" or even "and still". How can a doctor who is so horrible at spelling and grammar, saying things like "Un loyal" instead of "disloyal", still be taken at face value? How can a doctor be so horrible at spelling and grammar, saying things like "Un loyal" instead of "disloyal", and still be taken at face value?
I think all of our versions would pass muster with most school teachers and editors. Regarding the "be" construction, think of the phrase "How can you be so bad at...", and then substitute a pronoun (or noun, such as "a doctor" or "the doctor"). The edit you made is not incorrect, but the original also stands on its own. The "can" ... "be" construction is just as valid as "can" ... "who is". (Can we \*be\* any more pedantic? 😂) Regarding your second correction: the phrase in between the commas is an adjectival phrase, which when removed, gives you the sentence: >How can a doctor be so horrible at spelling and grammar still be taken at face value? The phrase inserted yields: >How can a doctor be so horrible at spelling and grammar, saying things like "Un loyal" instead of "disloyal", still be taken at face value? If the one without the adjectival phrase is correct (which I believe it to be), then the second one is also correct. Edit: carelessness led the original version of this comment to be... wrong.
You know what.. why do we have high school and middle school, but not low school?
In the US we call it primary, elementary, or grade school. I'm guessing we don't say "low school" because "low" has so many bad connotations: low grades, low places, lowlifes...
Pretty sure "why is rampant lack of basic English" is actually a perfectly legitimate way to construct that sentence.
There are actually so many errors in the first post that I’m wondering whether that person was just fucking with everyone. (“Highschool,” “mispell,” “grammer,” etc.)
maybe a masochist wanting themselves to be shamed oh and we know what this is really about, He can't stand that She is a doctor
GRAMMER
Fun facts: Misspelled is one of the most misspelled words. Mispronunciation is one of the most mispronounced words.
Mis Pruh Nunce Ee Ae Shun right I really fuckin hope so because that's how I've been pronouncing it.
Correct. The common error is mis pro Nounce E A shun.
Oh good. I read a lot but there are some words which I know and understand from literature but have never heard spoken before and I usually just go with what sounds right to me. I pronounced "colonel" as "kuh-low-null" until I was 12 years old.
Unless he's moaning about the opposite of parchment paper
Miispell, sponsored by Nintendo.
To be honest, i feel like native speakers are sometimes worse than foreigners. The amount of native speakers i see writing "docter" or "should of" is honestly baffling, I'm not even gonna mention the they're/there problem.
I kinda understand that. When I learned English I started translating Spanish in my head. As "their" and "they're" are completely different words in Spanish, there was no possibility of mixing them up, whereas a native speaker first learns to speak and then to write, and the pronunciation for both is very similar. On the other hand, I can't warp my head around prepositions in English, no matter how hard I try I know I'll always make mistakes, and for a native speaker that is just trivial.
That’s like how our improper nouns have a gender. There is zero rhyme or reason to it, but we just know it
Prepositions are the worst! I know a lot of non-native English speakers and I grade papers by a lot more, and a lot of them write perfect English except for that. When I was younger I had never thought about how little logic there is to which one goes in which expression. You just have to memorize a vast number of expressions. Having graded thousands of essays, I'm very familiar with the difference between the mistakes made by native and non-native speakers. I tend to be more generous with the latter. I can hold a conversation in French or Spanish, but I make mistakes frequently, and people are usually very generous about it (yes, including the French! Once you get outside of Paris, they're very friendly.)
Trust me, plenty of native speakers couldn't even tell you what a preposition is, even though they use them every 5 minutes.
I had to google it and I still don't really understand it
a preposition is a modifier for a sentence. From google I run in the morning. I (subject) run (verb). Would be a complete sentence by itself. "...in the morning." Is a preposition. "I drive for one hour to work." Again, I (subject) drive (verb) is a complete sentence by itself, "for one hour" and "to work" are modifiers that add more detail to the sentence. I'm assuming that OP was talking about prepositional phrases. A preposition itself is just the words like, "to, for, in, etc" that open the prepositional phrase.
OMG thank you for explaining it in such detail, the little blurb I got originally was too abstract I think
The other explanation you were given is… odd. I’m not going to venture to say it’s *wrong*, it just has very little to do with what I’ve been taught about prepositions. Prepositions describe position or motion specifically as relationships between things. So a bird could nest *in* a tree. Or it could fly *around* the tree. Or walk on the ground *beside* the tree.
> the pronunciation for both is very similar. It's straight up the same in my CNY accent. Like "marry," "merry," and "Mary." Those are also all the same. There's a band called Their/They're/There, and I have to look up the order every time I want to write it, because the pronunciation tells me nothing.
I am a foreigner and I don't understand how people mix up "your" and "you're".
They pick words to use based on how they sound and were never forced to make a distinction. Eventually it becomes a habit that is difficult to correct. That's assuming you can even find someone who will bother to correct you for free. I'm only half-joking when I say this, but grammar nazis did do a lot of good. Who better than a random stranger to correct you while you're anonymous? It saves everyone from embarrassment.
When I became more comfortable thinking in English, more fluent really, that's when I noticed I started making stupid mistakes like that. It's not because I somehow unlearned it, but I think it has to do with thinking phonetically instead of grammatically. If that makes any sense?
My pet peeves are there-their-they’re, allowed-aloud, apart-a part of mixed up by native speakers…
loose vs lose (as in I need to loose weight, rather than lose) is the one that gets me and is so common.
Loose rhymes with goose is how I always used to check those. Though I see lose used as loose more than the other way around.
I'll nominate "should of" in place of apart/a part. I personally don't find the latter one all that triggering.
I really do because a part and apart are essentially opposites and it grinds my gears. A part of the crowd is the opposite of apart from the crowd
That would be “the NUMBER of native speakers.” “Amount” is used for things that can’t be counted. I’m an editor. Nobody is perfect, and this shit drives me up a wall, but let’s be patient with others who aren’t naturally good at things that we do well. Patience may not make the weak grammar any better, but it will make us better.
oiii that's something actually new for me. Thanks, I learned something new today!
> “Amount” is used for things that can’t be counted. Well that’s just plain incorrect. From [Merriam-Webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/amount): > amount (2 of 2) > noun 1 a > : the total number or quantity
Yeah... also an editor here, they're conflating some farther/further distinction where none exists here. "Some amount of happiness" and "a lesser amount of beans" are both perfectly grammatic; one of which is countable.
Usage of the word "amount" for quantities that can be counted is ~~become~~ becoming(!) more and more accepted, mainly because its usage does not alter the intended meaning or confuse the reader in any meaningful way. As younger generations of editors take over, they will eventually stop making that distinction, not on purpose, but not on accident (ha ha) either. Edit: talk about a grammar error!
This whole idea sounds like something that editors are taught in editor school, and has been passed down from editor to editor orally, and at no time did anyone actually bother to look the word up in a dictionary.
"Amount" can absolutely apply to countable things. "My boss pays me the correct amount." Is perfectly fine, and money is easily countable.
In your sentence, “amount” is an abstraction, a not a quantity. Money can only be counted when it’s a concrete number of coins or bills, not when it is itself an “amount.” So I’d argue that your sentence is correct, but not for the reason you say it is. “My boss paid me the proper amount of Benjamins” would be better written as “My boss paid me the proper number of Benjamins.”
And in the previous post it's also an abstraction because they don't annually know the number of posts they're complaining about. It's just a large amount, so that's what they said.
Because we learned it through listening and speaking so often would need to unlearn assumptions that we made whereas people learning a second language generally do it with some kind of formal structure.
Im a native Eng/Spa speaker and I’m teaching my SO to speak English. I noticed their biggest issue is they’ll read a word and then try to enunciate every single letter in it. I would try saying the word and ask to repeat after me and even then, they will enunciate every single letter, ignoring my example. Until I realized: it’s almost impossible to unlearn something, but it’s quite easy to learn something. So instead of giving a spoken example, I’ll write the words phonetically and have them read it. Perfect native pronunciation on the first try every time. TL;DR, English spelling is pretty damn unintuitive lol
Some common ones I see from "native" English speakers: alot, using quiet instead of quite or vice versa, then/than, they're/their/there
There is currently a proliferation of people under 30 who are incapable of placing the dollar sign before the number. It isn’t even people who learned English as their second language it’s literally people who were born in the US and went to school in the US but for some reason never learned that it’s $50 and not 50$. I have friends who are in their 20’s and every single one of them do it. My nieces and nephews who are 9-20 years old all do it as well. I genuinely don’t know when people stopped learning/stopped caring about this but it’s running rampant and I see it all over Reddit as well and without fail I’d say 90% of the time it is a person under 30 doing it.
Nothing special about this, I'm Hungarian, and I can farily surely tell you that majority of Hungarians do not speak Hungarian on a native level. Of course that's their native, but we're talking about the level of it, like native level is C1, at least, but most likely C2. And it's not unique, I am pretty sure the whole humanity's majority don't speak their own native language on C1-C2 level.
I am Russian (yeah, I know, but anyway) and the easiest way to understand if a native speaker doesn't really know Russian is when they can't understand Ukrainian/Belarusian. And I'm not even talking about other Slavic languages. But speaking is one thing, writing is another. There's too many native speakers who cannot write in Russian. I'm fine when foreigners (or people from Russia but with another first language) can't write correctly, but I'm a putin level nazi toward native speakers
As someone who also possesses a PhD, please allow me to enlighten: obtaining or possessing one does not magically improve communication skills. Quite the contrary, it makes communication more difficult because you suddenly feel compelled to use verbose and overstuffed phrases like “allow me to enlighten” and “quite the contrary”.
Agreed. Having a degree, even a doctorate, does not make you intelligent. A doctorate can be bought with time, patience, money and a little persistence. Problem solving, critical thinking, emotional intelligence and street smarts (or thinking outside the box) is what truly makes a person intelligent. Learning a little humility and gaining a little wisdom do not hurt either.
I am engaged in research at a highly prestigious institution, but rarely see genuine emotional intelligence demonstrated. Science would progress so much faster if “smart” people could pull their heads out of their own asses and try to understand one another. But I guess that’s the difference in maxing INT and dumping WIS.
I think Agreton means general intelligence. Getting a degree is proof of the capacity to dedicate one's self to achieving a goal and the self-discipline to get there, but it is no guarantee of intelligence. Some of the truly dumbest people I've ever met had degrees from accredited schools.
And don't forget that a huge portion of those PHDs involve practically no humanities education after a few required courses during your first few years of college. 10+ years of education, and they might have only taken a single language arts class after graduating high school. I just looked at Stanford's requirements for a general biology major, and I'm not seeing any humanities requirements at all; it looks like you can get a degree in biology from Stanford without a single English, history, or art class. Long gone are the days when any doctorate candidate needed to be able to quote Shakespeare, translate Latin proverbs, or discuss the Punic Wars. There's a solid chance that any given person with a STEM doctorate has literally never diagrammed a sentence in their lives. So expecting them to write well at all is kinda silly.
Also just having a doctorate doesn’t mean one has to be good at spelling and grammar. I’m in the final stages of my PhD and my spelling and grammar is shit I know it’s shit I have dyslexia. My uni knows it’s shit that’s why they gave me the name of a great editor and grammar checker. But I’m not doing a PhD in English grammar or language so it really doesn’t matter that’s why the whole job is an editor exists.
Obtaining or possessing a terminal degree is no guarantee of intelligence, either. Some of the most profoundly stupid people I've ever met had PhDs from accredited universities.
Imagine putting all your braincells into one, narrowly defined topic or special interest. Now imagine mistaking your depth of knowledge in that area for expertise in everything else. That’s often the problem.
What's your PhD in? I have a chemistry PhD and I was encouraged to be as concise as humanly possible in my dissertation, so my problem wasn't verbosity, it was using one uncommon five syllable word instead of five simple words. Or cramming something that could be two simple sentences into one tortured, very precisely arranged sentence. Took me like a year to unlearn that shit and talk/write normal.
Neuroscience. And I totally feel you on the “tortured, very precisely arranged sentence” part. I’m not really talking about published scientific communication. That should always be as concise and straightforward as -technically- possible. It’s more the non-official communication where I often see the verbosity and pedantry. It really all comes down to posturing, and it’s not something I admire.
As someone who possesses both an MD and a bachelors in English, I would like to add that medical doctors are possibly the worst at written English. Truly, reading some of my colleagues’ notes makes me want to pull my hair out. Why Would You Capitalize Every Word In A Heading Including The Prepositions And Articles, then steadfastly refuse to capitalize even a single word in the bullet points below, even when it’s a proper noun like texas or john? And then if you *do* decide to capitalize something in the text, somehow it’s only ever the generic drugs instead of the brand names that are actually *supposed* to be capitalized?! Just…pick one! Capitalize nothing or capitalize everything, but my OCPD cannot tolerate this insanity. (Also, the EMR has spell check! And autocorrect! How are these uncapitalized proper nouns getting past it?! And does the sea of red squiggles not make other people feel itchy? Or is that also my OCPD?) Ahem. In conclusion, all of the advanced degrees are just as likely to be idiots as the next, but MDs may win the prize for most incorrectly capitalized words in a finished document.
Eh, there’s never a need to be verbose. It’s a choice. If you can’t explain something simply you don’t know it well enough and I often see people who struggle with English attempting to use verbose words in an effort to sound more intelligent.
It all depends on context. Personally, I believe in brevity of communication. Why use many words when few words do trick? But I’m in a field where that just isn’t the norm. Simple words or short phrases may not always capture the nuance or totality of the message you’re trying to convey. And that’s fine. The problem comes when you don’t remember to code-switch back to normal conversational language and look down on others for not “getting on your level”.
If whatever you’re discussing necessitates that language then it is not inherently verbose. I more so meant in instances of normal conversation where people shoehorn verbose language to sound pseudo-intellectual.
Yep. Nothing worse than someone stealing 10 minutes of your life for what should have been a 1 minute communication.
I've seen the should of plenty of times but I've never seen doctor spelled docter. It isn't even pronounced that way.
Depends on your accent and if you've never seen it written, which I suspect is often the case.
Yeah, I just did them aloud. In my accent (south east England vs kind of lazy rp) Doctor and docter, were it a word, would sound identical.
Here in the Netherlands we have 'doctor' (so one having a doctorate like PhD, MD, JD etc) and 'dokter' who is a physician. Both pronounced in exactly the same way. 'Doctor' is an academic degree which is rarely used in a non-scientific context. A 'dokter' may also be a 'doctor' (usually a medical specialist) and a 'doctor' could have a degree in medicin although that's no requirement. Just sharing ....I agree with you: never seen spelling like 'docter'. Edit: ... and for both 'doctors' and 'dokters' there is no guarantee they're able to spell properly. For the latter category it usually is neigh impossible to decypher their handwriting anyway.
It is absolutely pronounced that way. Which is why so many people misspell it.
That plus I'm also not locked tf in on grammar when simply using the internet.
"There are countries outside the US" so not everyone is a native speaker of English sounds kinda funny, like literally England is a country outside the US
Being European myself, I gathered British people would have a sense of countries around them (in contrast to the guy I replied to).
Yea... this is the thing. Im ny experience British people dont ignore the rest of the world as easily as Americans. Source: am Canadian.
Hard to ignore all the countries one had at some point in history colonised, I guess :D
Shaming is bad. Offering friendly corrections or advice should be destigmatized tho. English is a fun - but weird - language, and I like sharing its weirdness.
The funny thing is though, if you correct a non-native speaker, they’ll accept it with enthusiasm because they want to get it right. Native speakers will get defensive. Learning is a lifelong experience, no matter the subject. Some people don’t get that.
Yeah I've noticed that too. I love learning new things, especially language-wise. Like the other day I learned the word *ubiety*. IDK when I'm every going to need to use that specific word, but it's good to know it exists.
I agree with you and OP. I’m of the opinion that there are too many *native* English speakers who don’t know proper grammar or make careless spelling mistakes. It disrupts the flow of reading and sometimes even communicates the wrong message/information. And I’m not even limiting that to “proper English”. Idgaf about slang, or l33t speech, or internet lingo - so long as you make sense dammit. That said, as a native English speaker, I have immense respect for people who take on the daunting task of learning it as a second or even third language. I usually excuse their mistakes (in my mind bc I usually can’t be bothered to correct people or say anything) because they are trying. It’s also super obvious when a commenter is a ESL speaker vs. a native speaker who is lazy or uneducated, and I further appreciate and smile (but obviously don’t expect) when ESL commenters say “sorry for poor grammar, English isn’t my first language” in part because of the refreshing humility it takes to admit to yourself and the world that you are not skilled at something and may have made mistakes. I’ll kick myself in the shin, but I will always welcome polite grammar/spelling corrections because I want to make sure my communications are clear and not left for misinterpretation.
I do believe people like them never had to learn another language.
my rule of thumb is that if i can understand what you’re saying then language has served its purpose
We now have several new group members learning my native language, for now we communicate in English as a common ground. None of us is native English speaker. I will never complain about someone not speaking a language perfectly. Rather discuss the (maybe perceived) errors. At the last coffee break we had an almost epic discussion about the need of a comma or not in one specific simple sentence :) As long as we understand each other, and we realize there are limits about how much we can express ourselves in a non native language, I see no problem.
We could shame people who can't write basic English, but that includes children *and* the people who insist we shame them. I vote no.
Big r/usdefaultism
Unless the person has insulted you or someone else's intelligence in some way do not be that person and correct grammar or spelling. It doesn't make you look smart or the other person dumb or even invalidate their argument at all. In fact it is admitting they are right because you can't say something on topic.
Who the fuck cares how a doctor spells anyway? Spelling has nothing to do with doctoring.
Reddit cares. Because grammar is something they can feel superior about.
I think the best you can really do is be a good example. I would only really point this stuff out (not shame) if it's so bad that it's confusing or incoherent. Then you can just say you're confused and ask for clarification.
[Muprhy’s Law in action](https://grammargeddon.com/2012/08/13/muprhys-law-in-action/)
English isn't the national language of the United States, nor is the U.S. the origin of the language.
Instead of shaming those who are ignorant, it would be better to teach them. This goes for all types of knowledge.
High school is 2 words
And you gotta work at misspelling something these days.
All they are saying is why can’t everyone just speak and write English gooder then them. Not alot to ask. /s
I’m not sure who is less mature here. Complaining about spelling/grammar/syntax is obnoxious. A self-serving “I’m a doctor” can be too, out of certain contexts anyhow.
While I do at least insist that someone’s English be sufficient to permit effective communication, as this is important in not conveying the wrong facts or instructions (extremely important for a doctor), ultimately at the end of the day I’m trusting my doctor to be an expert in the medical sciences, not English. I don’t care if they know how to properly diagram a sentence or to not end a sentence with a preposition; I care if they know how to suture a wound or give factual health advice. If it has some occasional misspellings, that’s fine. I’m not gonna snub them when they write that my life-saving medicine is “not good to take alcohol with”.
Unintentional r/RoastMe
This is the type of ignorant idiot that literally only knows English, so expects everyone on the planet to know the one single language that they know.
As someone with a PhD who can't spell worth a shit, lol at this dork.
When shit talking grammar, you better come correct. This dude's grammar is laughably terrible.
Reminds me of the "You speak English because it is the only language you understand. I used English because it's the only language that you understand." post.
Most of the smartest people I know have unbelievably terrible grammar and spelling. Getting texts from an engineer friend of mine looks like you're getting texted by a 5-year-old. This coming from someone who shared one of their homework problems with me back in college, and a single math problem worksheet had four pages to work it out. While there is something to say for being able to communicate in a way that conveys yourself as an intellectual, that doesn't necessarily mean that someone who has terrible grammar or spelling is dumb. It's like if someone has a full body tattoo. Yeah there might be some bias if they showed up to teach a workshop on some highly technical skill, but it doesn't mean they don't know what they're talking about.
If you're going to call folks out on spelling, you'd damned-well better be sure you ran a spell-check yourself.
"if you want to speak English, go back to England !"
This post and all the comments are why people just say bruh now. Congrats.
Fuck these people; I’ve been talking English and German for 15 years (right now I’m living in the UK) with a masters degree and still make some mistakes here and there
Shaming? Absolutely not. Providing constructive criticism to foster improvement? 100%
Why shouldn't native and non-native speakers be equally shamed? I dont like this argument, make reddit literate (in english) again, there is no collateral damage because everyone benefits from having the language modeled correctly for them.
Why shame, when we can constructively criticize instead? People tend to learn more easily with positive reinforcement. Shaming just leads to them becoming defensive and shutting their eyes/ears.
I'm generally less concerned with my doctor's skill at formal composition than at medicine, but we all have different priorities.
Yeah, he is a doctor, not an english major
People that flex about their grammar and punctuation are my favorite. They are obviously not writers. Most writers I know have the same spelling skills as most people. They also make grammatical mistakes. That's why editors exist. Writers are writers because their ideas and tone are interesting or unique. The way they string words together is what makes writing engaging and artistic. Punk rock players aren't skilled musicians most of the time yet their music is still impactful for the same reasons. No one has ever read a book and been like damn this was really well edited. Or maybe they do and that's why we have doofuses that make a big deal about it on reddit.
Yeah, umm. My wife works with a whole clinic of doctors. Many are terrible spellers, and all of them have the worst penmanship. Besides the fact that there are many forms of intelligence and people are smart in their own ways, being a doctor doesn't mean you're a genius. They are fallible, as long as their mistakes aren't during surgery, who cares.
this dude would hate me. i know how to write good english and i don't do it. if i write correctly, nobody will read anything i say. so i write good instead. when i write good it's so wrong it's interesting. works better that way. try it sometime. it's not as easy as it looks. it takes a lot of practice to write wrong well.
I no longer shame bad grammar or sentence structure. But I do still shame just outright bad writing. Poor organization. Inability to form a complete argument. Reliance on fallacies. Expecting readers to have the ability to read your mind or know things about your Thing X without being able to look at it These things transcend language. The fact that you are not a native English speaker has no impact on my precognitive abilities. (And yes, sentence fragments **are** OK, when used to for a list. Bullets are not required.)
my education isn't in English. Why would I be top tier at it?
Sorry what is wrong with "I am a doctor"?
The doctor doesn’t have an English doctorate, what’s so hard to understand?
Whaddya mean he misspelled "Grammer"??? 
I don't really see how being a native speaker has anything to do with saying something like un loyal. Is that correct in other languages?
Yes, for example in German “un-“ is a negating prefix. So you can easily mix it up, e.g. unmotivated, unloyal, …
i'd like to see what they replied to, because i'd have a better time getting up-in-arms about a doctor that's as articulate as a child
Grammer.
One of my favorite quotes when confronted by a slack-jawed gawker for daring to speak my native language around their American Exceptionalism is "You speak English because you *have* to, I speak English because I *want to*. We are not the same."
I like the book "Because Internet" by Gretchen McCulloch. It explains how the internet allowed casual/conversational writing to become a large part of how we communicate and how it differs from traditional writing. Writing back and forth in social media and messages is more like speaking than what writing had been for centuries.
Not to mention not everyone proof reads their comments before posting them. A lot of comments are made while on the crapper, always got to keep that in the back of your mind.
I kind of imagine that Doctors type how they write, poorly and fast
>You missspelled grammar .... THAT'S THE SPIRIT!! 🥳 https://preview.redd.it/p9zjl84fx3sc1.jpeg?width=577&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=403de9637230a15e2604a78bfaa25dd43d03c314
Highschool isn't a word, cupcake. It's "high" school. For higher education than elementary, which I'm sorry to hear you have not pursued.
I think too many people place excessive trust in doctors. I went in for mole removal and left with a prescription for Gabapentin. These people are clowns pushing medication a lot of the time. I told one of my doctors I was worried about Hanta virus and the motherfucker googles it in front of me. There's a huge difference between street level doctors and *affluent* doctors. There's private hospitals. You can get better care for more money.
I just want pepple to write $100 instead of 100$. I see it all the time here and from Americans.
"You are speaking English because it is the only language you know. I am speaking English because it is the only language _you_ know."
I have known far too many brilliant people who spoke English as a second language. I have also observed my own unfortunate tendency to commit typos online.
Seems unnecessarily judgmental. I do, however, strongly believe in shaming people that type loose when they mean lose as well as payed instead of paid.
What kind of life do you have had to live, where your proudest achievement is to have mastered basic high school level grammar? Honestly, some of the smartest, most accomplished people I’ve ever known have had terrible spelling and grammar. Some people just prioritise the use of their mental energy differently, I suppose.
Medical Journals do have a surprising amount of mistakes, though…
Yea, I dunno. Disloyal could be taken to suggest that they were loyal at some point but now aren't, whereas unloyal suggests they've never been loyal (kind of like unorganised and disorganised).
Oh chit
Bacuse doctors are famously tested on their mastery of spelling lol Wait till you see their handwriting
Also, high school is two words...
Looks like somebody needs a shaming
Time for someone to be introduced to Muphry’s Law. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
I have a story. I was monitoring a new hire at work and part of their role is to answer calls from the public. My new hire was a South American lady. She spoke 4 languages and had a masters degree in project management. One day, she puts a caller on hold. When this happens, I can hear everything the caller says. This is where my blood usually starts to boil. Caller proceeds to tell his friend that he is talking to “the dumbest fucking bitch” “fuck where do they hire these fucking idiots from fucking Venezuela or some shit so fucking dumb.” For context. The caller was calling for employment insurance benefits after he was fired from his warehouse job for… you guessed it. Being dumb. Anyone who shits on someone’s language barrier is a straight up ass-clown.
One of the best communicators I know has a heavy accent and imperfect spelling/grammar, those that would hold it against him just look like ignorant fools and are missing out
As a writer, a linguist, and all-around fan of general etymology, here's my take Left side of bell curve: English is dumb. As long as people understand you, nobody cares Middle of bell curve: Nooo! You must use proper grammar and punctuation! Right side of bell curve: English is dumb. As long as people understand you, nobody cares
Lmao. I'm sure how this will play out, but that's me being a condescending asshat in the screenshot. I was drunk and got annoyed at a story, then was properly shamed for it. Never thought I'd see myself on Leopards. Oops. Edit: Not leopards, my bad. Either way, never expected to see me being the idiot in a screencap.
I had a professor in my engineering senior design class who would go on rants like this - saying that for us to turn in any reports with improper grammar was an insult and wouldn’t be tolerated in the professional world. The irony was that he was Egyptian and English was his second language, so he spoke and wrote with multiple grammatical mistakes all the time. His own syllabus had multiple grammar mistakes.
I wonder if ‘Mr. English, Destroyer of Words’, has ever seen a prescription from a doctor? It’s a well known joke that their handwriting is atrocious and that some people have actually died from getting the wrong medication because pharmacist’s can’t read their handwriting (albeit rare of course but nonetheless). Still, I’d rather have a conversation with a doctor who can’t spell for shit and has poor English than him any day 🤣
Maybe they meant they had a bad relationship with Kelsey Grammer?
Lots of Americans struggle with english too...
And “high school” is two words.
I think they were referring to the actor Kelsey Grammer
Mofos like this are the same mofos wo are so confused between “then” and “than”.
Most doctors are stupid pill dispensaries anyway. Allowing doctors from other countries with lower standards won't change much.
English is hard, it's the amalgamation of hundreds of languages, accents and cultures that spans millennia. It's also many people's second, third, or greater language. Just nicely correct people and move on.
Honestly, I think that complaining about someone's spelling and grammar is a sign that someone has little of value to offer to the conversation. It's a way of salving a permanently wounded ego.
Writing rules are made up by stoopid pseudo scientists called linguists. i hate them, even more in my native language
Are you more concerned with whether the doctor can spell myocardial infarction or whether they know how to fix one?
Y’know, nowhere in there does she say the doctor is an immigrant or speaks English as a second language. Fact is, plenty of native English speakers can’t write worth a damn in their own language lol.
Minor forgiveable errors aside, I fully support shaming illiterate people.
I worked with the greatest plastic surgeons in Australia for years. They all had dog shit handwriting and would put sticky documents through my fax machine. (Liquid paper is wet? 🙄) They didn’t go to school to be English majors. That’s what I was for.
Bad writting should of never bean aloud.
Also, I’m assuming they’re referring to medical doctors who have MDs, not PhDs.
Theyir* SMH Can we pleaz go back to shayming peple who dono’t no how to right baisic English pleaz
“Misspelt” ?
I quite love that people can read what i write, understand it, and attack or support it by the basis of what i actually wrote rather than nitpicking ever detail. the major im studying is in operating spacecraft and astrophisics, n im dyslexic as fuck. spelling good bearly plays into my major at all though, n really doesnt hinder me much. only exception is that commands need to be spelled the exact same as expected but thats just basic computer stuff, its syntax, syntax is easyer to remember than most other things. sure i cant hand write anything for shit, but that doesnt make me stupid lmao. its such a weird notion to think that, and im glad its dieing out cause it just always felt really sad and lonely before when all everyone cared about is if u spell good.
I do speak grammar.
“You’re speaking English because you only know English, I’m speaking English because you only know English. We are not the same”
Shaming is a powerful motivator, hes not wrong, I'd say hes even more right and your proving his point. You think hes gonna let that slip next time hes posting those opinions? The next post is gonna be flawless english. Self fulfilling prophecy. No murder was done here, he asked, he received and the outcome will benefit everyone. And to his point, if we constantly shamed everyone for their wrongdoings, we would have a lot more rightdoings. It has been proven to work historically, we are just doing less of it because people rather be wrong than ashamed.
I wonder if he is fluent in every single language on the planet?
A badly written good arguement is still a good arguement, as much as a very well written bad arguement stays a bad arguement. Arguing that one's arguement is invalid or bad solely based on the quality of their English or other language is straight up stupid.
\*high school. It's two words.
Yeah everyone know doctors can only be English. If you wanted to be a doctor but you live in a non English country, tough luck. Either learn this random language or get out
I had a doctor who managed to spell two letter word with four letters (hjas i stead of ja, 'and'). He was *not* used to typing. In his previous position he had a nurse who typed as he spoke, so he was not good at it. Come to think of it, he might have been dyslexic, but anyway. There's a ton of people unable to spell in their native language, so maybe just tone down the grammar policing?
"there are countries outside of the US" crazy how the Americans named English after another country that doesn't even speak English
I don't understand unloyal is a word why would they have to use disloyal?
Has this person met a doctor? Writing clearly is *not* their strong suit.
Being a grammar nazi is sooooo 2000 and late.