Minor 'typing' errors

September 22, 2005 7:11 AM

oops, 'Piccadilly' - is it really necessary for everyone to correct extremely minor 'typing' errors with a follow up comment?
posted by Frasermoo to Bugs at 7:11 AM (46 comments total)

Go back to bed. Stay there for 5 minutes. Then get up, this time from the other side.
posted by mds35 at 7:15 AM on September 22, 2005

The reason this stood out is that gsb posts a good comment with the nonsensical word 'inasmuch' yet takes the time to post a further comment highlighting a very simple and common spelling error which most wouldn't have noticed.

Seriously this is not a call out, but it just seems a bit much. We have all done it after we have seen an error in a posting or comment. Are we all too afraid of appearing maybe slightly 'stupid' because we make spelling or typing mistakes?
posted by Frasermoo at 7:15 AM on September 22, 2005

We've had this discussion before. The concensus (hey, cleardawn!) is that:

1) Nobody thinks it's necessary
2) Some people think it is a good thing
3) Some people are neutral about it
4) Some people think it's a bad thing

That pretty much covers it.
posted by Bugbread at 7:17 AM on September 22, 2005

mds35 - you're too quick. I was busy making sure I hadn't made any errors on my 'more inside'....
posted by Frasermoo at 7:17 AM on September 22, 2005

I meant my comment to be cute, not nasty. But seriously, I read MeTa for the real dirt, you know, the knock-down drag-out stuff, and to see content spammers, trolls, and self-linkers get busted. This thread just doesn't seem worth the popcorn, nor is it likely to improve t community. Am I wrong?
posted by mds35 at 7:21 AM on September 22, 2005

oops! "improve *the* community."
posted by mds35 at 7:22 AM on September 22, 2005

Are we all too afraid of appearing maybe slightly 'stupid' because we make spelling or typing mistakes?

Yes. If you were having a face-to-face conversation with a stranger and he corrected himself after mispronouncing a word, would it irritate you?
posted by Armitage Shanks at 7:26 AM on September 22, 2005

What I said in the previous thread. And what Bugbread said.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 7:29 AM on September 22, 2005

Um, the meta thread about stupid askme answers, I meant.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 7:30 AM on September 22, 2005

We've actually one this one before, too. It was a trainwreck, as I recall.

And. I reckon if people cared even more than they did at the moment about 'appearing maybe slightly 'stupid' in their comments, Metafilter would be a happier shinier place... full of pretentious dorks that they couldn't pay you enough to go out for a drink with on Friday night.

But there'd be less of the Stupid, and that wouldn't be a bad thing, now would it?
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 7:42 AM on September 22, 2005

'done this one before', of course, is what I meant to say.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 7:43 AM on September 22, 2005

Heh.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 7:43 AM on September 22, 2005

Yes, it was hastily written and there's more than one error. My correction was a reflex, it comes from a bad upbringing.

I don't post much, I don't post many comments so when this does happen the impact is minor. I don't expect or want this 'corrective' behaviour from other people. I will probably do it again.
posted by gsb at 7:45 AM on September 22, 2005

Don't beat yourself up there. I was just using you as an example. Relish your MeTa moment.
posted by Frasermoo at 7:50 AM on September 22, 2005

This is easy. We'll just assume from now on that every post is accidental, a typo, the product of treachery, written by a crazed junkie during a brief moment of inattention to a public terminal, or otherwise unavoidable and regrettable. Then we only have to mark the posts that come out as intended.
posted by moift at 8:05 AM on September 22, 2005

*looks good
posted by moift at 8:05 AM on September 22, 2005

For every person that doesn't correct their own spelling errors, there's someone else who'll post, "It's Piccadilly, not Picadilly, asshat!"

Which one's more annoying?
posted by Robot Johnny at 8:06 AM on September 22, 2005

inasmuch:

1 : in the degree that : INSOFAR AS
2 : in view of the fact that : SINCE

Nonsensical, as in, in the dictionary type of nonsensical? A lot of the words I hear today as supposed "non-words", such as ain't, irregardless, (now) inasmuch are actual, real words that the complainers are too lazy to look up. I trust Merriam-Webster more than you... sorry. I do enjoy making bets on whether the words exist or not, though. It's easy pocket money!

English is a living language. Deal. Yes this drives me nuts. When do I get to post it to the grey?!
posted by shepd at 8:14 AM on September 22, 2005

I love when people correct my spelling mistakes. It makes it much easier to add them to my kill file and avoid having to deal with these persnickety, anal retentive fuckheads in future threads. Its a win-win situation.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 8:15 AM on September 22, 2005

oops. apologies to you gsb for my inasmuch mistake.
posted by Frasermoo at 8:18 AM on September 22, 2005

Its a win-win situation.

It's a win-win situation.
posted by eddydamascene at 8:26 AM on September 22, 2005

concensus?
posted by mds35 at 8:36 AM on September 22, 2005

I red an articl teh othre day abuot how mots peopel don't notiec speling erors when theiy're readig at a nomal pase.

Even if you take your time on a sentence that has a lot of errors like the last one, odds are you won't catch every single one of them just because your brain, apparently, makes a kind of auto-correct for you as you read.
posted by shmegegge at 9:12 AM on September 22, 2005

mds35 writes "concensus?"

Ah, thanks mds35, it looks like I've been spelling that wrong for a while.
posted by Bugbread at 9:23 AM on September 22, 2005

.
posted by grateful at 9:24 AM on September 22, 2005

"...it looks like I've been spelling that wrong for a while"

Don't you frickin' hate that? My hope is that by the time I'm 85 years old, I'll have eliminated all the spelling and grammatical mistakes to which I'm prone. Just in time to die.

Okay, here's one that's embarassing. I'm a native New Mexican, right? I don't speak Spanish, but I'm well familiar with it and am more sensitive to the most "correct" anglicized pronounciation than other southwesterners I've known.

However, in spite of the fact that so many SoCal place names are in Spanish, I don't think of them as Spanish because, you know, Rancho Santa Fe is pretty much not hispanic while Santa Fe is. If you get my meaning.

Anyway, here's the thing: I just realized two days ago that I've been mentally misprouncing La Jolla in subvocalization since forever. I mean, for some reason I stopped and thought about the name and parsed it as a Spanish word and then--click!--oh, it's that place. Which is incredibly stupid. I mean, I know how to say Pojoaque, for crying out loud.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 9:32 AM on September 22, 2005

Sorry bugbread. gGven the context, I just couldn't resist.
posted by mds35 at 9:39 AM on September 22, 2005

MetaTalk, meet brick wall. Brick wall, meet MetaTalk. Please commence with the pounding.
posted by deborah at 10:07 AM on September 22, 2005

EB, I'm trying to imagine something, anything, that would induce me to subvocalize "La Jolla" that often, and I *grew up* there.

I had an experience that was sort of a mirror image of yours once while staying in Los Angeles. Some people (native English speakers all) were talking about a neighborhood or street that I understood to be "Las Filas." It took driving around for days and seeing all the street signs to realize they were talking about "Los Feliz."
posted by expialidocious at 10:48 AM on September 22, 2005

Seriously this is not a call out, but it just seems a bit much.

What would make it a call out? Is telling someone that what they did was "a bit much" not a call out while telling someone that what they did was "over the line" a call out? What about "idiotic," "unnecessary," "unfortunate," or "just plain stupid"?

And if it doesn't bother you enough to call it out, why start a post on something that's been discussed several times before?

Since we have this pointless (feel free to substitute any of the other terms from two paragraphs back) thread, however, can we discuss the merits of "call out" versus "callout"?
posted by anapestic at 10:48 AM on September 22, 2005

anapestic writes "can we discuss the merits of 'call out' versus 'callout'?"

Sure. I'm figgering that "call out", with the assumed microsecond pause in the middle, refers to the verb, while "callout" refers to the noun (much in the same way that "flash back" is the verb and "flashback" is the noun). Can I hear an Amen??
posted by Bugbread at 11:08 AM on September 22, 2005

Can I hear an Amen??

I gather from the two question marks that you would like to hear an uncertain amen. Otherwise, you would have written, "Can I hear an 'Amen!'?"

We are, however, in agreement on the callout/call out question.
posted by anapestic at 11:27 AM on September 22, 2005

Actually, I was hoping for an amen, since I can't find any links to the loop itself.
posted by Bugbread at 11:36 AM on September 22, 2005

Is it really necessary for everyone to correct extremely minor 'typing' errors with a follow up comment?

Yes, absolutely and every time.
posted by LarryC at 11:51 AM on September 22, 2005

"EB, I'm trying to imagine something, anything, that would induce me to subvocalize 'La Jolla' that often, and I *grew up* there."

Heh. Well, I'm familiar enough with it to have formed the incorrect subvocalization of the name a long time ago. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't make the same mistake now. But this recent thing happened because I was reading a TWoP thread about shooting locations for Veronica Mars.

I notice the kind of thing you're talking about all the time. Seems like here in NM, most anglos figure out something close to the correct Spanish pronunciation and use it (with some notable exceptions), and you usually can spot the tourists and the recent arrivals by their mistakes. I have noticed in my recent move back to Albuquerque after more then ten years gone, an increase in bad anglo pronunciations. But where it drove me nuts was in Texas, where for many, many Spanish place-names, it's only the Hispanics who pronounce them correctly and the anglos are quite happy to mangle them, with often a Texas drawl. And "guada-loop", the accepted pronunciation in Austin, drove me insane.

Anyway, my mistake with La Jolla is such an egregious one that were I ever to have been caught in it (I don't know if I've ever spoken the city's name, but I've heard it often in TV and movies) I would have been mortified.

Like a lot of precocious readers and autodidacts working mostly outside of the culture one is assimilating through reading, I mispronounced a great many words when I was a kid and only corrected them when I finally heard people actually speak them. I don't discover any heretofore missed errors more than one every few years these days, but that means there's still a few there in my head, surely.

I do really love that moment when incongruity becomes congruity. In a lot of contexts. Another is when my location/direction awareness gets screwed up and I discover the error. In that case, it's very much metaphorically like the Earth shifting beneath my feet, but linguistic errors like this one are not dissimilar in how I experience them.

In a way, it's like being a kid again, with the world full of constantly veiled mystery, the veil suddenly pulled aside.

I really like being in an unfamiliar city and having that feeling of a vast unknown terrain surrounding me. So full of possibilities.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 12:02 PM on September 22, 2005

I've never come across an "La Jolla", but, while I can recognize how it's probably pronounced...what the hell does it mean? "La Joya" (the jewel), I get, but what is a "Jolla"?
posted by Bugbread at 12:44 PM on September 22, 2005

La Jolla boosters will tell you it's an alternate spelling of the Spanish word for jewel, and LJ-booster advertising is full of references to the jewel-like nature of the beaches, or the Cove, or whatever.

On the other hand I have heard speculation (from a local-history buff speaking at my school - a long time ago) that it's really either: an alternate spelling of the Spanish 'holla,' which is an archaic form of the word 'olla,' which is a pot; or an Indian word meaning 'hole.'

(Recent slang has made researching the archaic form of this Spanish word on Google futile. And I can't find a reliable citation on the Indian theory either. Anyone with a linguistic bent care to chime in?)

Anyway, given a choice between "The Jewel," "The Pot," and "The Hole," it's unsurprising which interpretation is most favored around there.
posted by expialidocious at 1:47 PM on September 22, 2005

is it really necessary

There is no open initiative to whittle down people's behavior to what is "really necessary" around here. We have callout after callout framed in similar terms:

"Do we really need X?"
"Is it really neceesary to do Y?"

Leave it be, sheezus. And for the record, yes I find quick follow-up spell corrections unnecessary and irritating. Tough shit for me.
posted by scarabic at 2:42 PM on September 22, 2005

Yeah:

[to] call out
[the] callout

[to] log in
[the] login

[to] fuck up
[the] fuckup
posted by Kirth Gerson at 5:14 PM on September 22, 2005

bugbread: Actually, I was hoping for an amen, since I can't find any links to the loop itself.
Try this.
posted by tellurian at 5:53 PM on September 22, 2005

for the longest time, I wondered where Arkansaw was, and also independently wondered if arkansas was a a town in kansas.

thank you, public school education.
posted by shmegegge at 8:08 PM on September 22, 2005

tellurian, that was one of the best links I've encountered in a long time.

has that already been posted on the blue before? if not, you should post it.
posted by shmegegge at 8:29 PM on September 22, 2005

I also still oddly occasionally subvocalize Illinois as "Ill-a-noise" even though I'm sure I've never actually said it that way since I was 7. By the way, even when I read fast, and I generally read much faster than average (though much slower than the speediest readers), I still sort of subvocalize. Which as I understand it, not many highly literate people do. It's probably why my written voice has a lot of speaking voice affectations, not to mention that I type my casual writing voice almost as quickly as I'd actually vocalize it (which also plays a big role in my prolixity).
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 8:52 PM on September 22, 2005

up until very recently I automatically subvocalized the word "hello," just because I had a bad habit of mispronouncing it "who the fuck are you and what do you want from me, you sick bastard?"
posted by shmegegge at 9:33 PM on September 22, 2005

Here's the previous MeTa thread about spelling self-corrections, if anyone wants to read more. Count me with languagehat, for what it's worth.
posted by mediareport at 11:08 PM on September 22, 2005

shmegegge writes "has that already been posted on the blue before? if not, you should post it."

It hasn't been blued, but this from the same site was, in this double had some mention of the Amen break page also being on the site.
posted by Bugbread at 6:23 AM on September 23, 2005