Hehehe I stopped of at the local
Big box store on the way home in my boots and full seat breeches and the guy behind me in line proceeded to tell me about his palomino Tennessee walker 17.5 hh stallion (who was a twin no less) jumper. Had to just about hold my eyeballs in their sockets to keep them from rolling out of my damn head.
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Never thought Iâd see this one: Sweet, sound, and sain!
(Interesting discussion about color vs. breed categorization. I am confident this lady was in the wrong referring to her solid paint horse as a pinto.)
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I try so hard to not be too snarky when I run across one of these. My former (thank god) SIL used to tell me about her 17 hand purebred Arabian stallion. Yeah. Sure he was. LOL
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Pardon me if some of these are repeatsâŠI tried to read the whole thread but may not have stored them all properly in RAM.
Gated. NoâŠitâs a gaited horse.
Shoed. NoâŠthe horse has been shod.
Gentile. NoâŠthe horse is gentle. Although I suppose there could be horses that are considered gentiles.
Bordering. No, weâre boarding.
Add (in reference to an advertisement). No, itâs an ad.
In regular life, apostrophes where they do not belong, âyourâ where people mean âyouâreâ and âtheirâ where they mean âtheyâreâ tend to chafe.
And add me to the list of people who become incredibly aggravated when people go on very confidently about things they donât actually know in the horse world. Itâs on my list of New Yearâs Resolutions to not let it bother me so much.
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So up through the 18th century English spelling could be quite variable, especially at the letter writing level, especially for women. Otherwise well informed people just spelled by ear. English dialects vary a lot too especially in vowels, so that played into spelling choices. Spelling wasnât seen as a necessary mark of intelligence or literacy or having a worthwhile thing to communicate. Obviously the very well educated were more consistent within their own texts but there were definitely regional variations.
Then there was an effort to standardize English spelling and punctuation. Not rationalize, just standardize. Iâm sure the boom in print culture in the 19th century played a role. But in order to inculcate this the education system had to drill down on rote tasks like spelling tests and spelling bees, which IMHO are the exact opposite of what you need to do to be an expressive writer.
Most online communication is very casual, even more so than a chatty 18th century letter from an effusive Countess. We see soundalike errors because they are natural to make, we see autocorrect errors and we see crazy voice to text errors. These last are likely hard to correct if you are using voice to text because you kind of need it for vision, dexterity or indeed writing skills.
And then there are the misheard expressions. Itâs a doggy dog world. A bottom down shirt.
BTW educators are now clutching their pearls because Chatgp, and AI program, can now write stilted little essays that are impossible to tell from either grade school or college exam questions
My humble opinion is that if your students are being taught to write in such a canned format that itâs indistinguishable from AI generated boiler plate, that is the problem.
Anyhow I notice and smile at sound alike errors in horse ads, and it tells me something about the writer. But it isnât a peeve in the sense that it bothers me. Iâm more irritated at bad content online, bad logic and untrue claims and ugly insults.
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Thank you, Scribber, that was wonderfully well said.
Some errors donât bother me because they indicate the person has only heard the word, not seen it in print. âWah la!â for âVoila!â is one, Cafe Ole for Cafe Au Lait is another.
Youâd have to know the word or phrase was French to have a clue how to spell it.
One of my favorite quotes: âFoolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.â RW Emerson
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I just got a resume for a position in my office and it said âI can handle issues in a slip second.â
I had to think hard about that one.
And, wishing (as I often do) that I could reasonably give constructive criticism to resume writers. So many bad onesâŠbad format, bad spelling, bad everything. You canât have misspellings on a resume - OR âmisheard expressions.â
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Is why spell check.
And why you have someone proofread your resume after spellcheck.
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YESSSSSS!!!
Iâm a terrible critic because I read resumes all the time, but I could make most of them better and some of them A LOT BETTER!
We just hired two people who would have been overlooked in a search 2 years ago; but when you only get 14 resumes, you have a more open mind. Their qualifications were good, but their resumes were terrible enough to make it hard to tell.
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My pet peeve is that resume writers assume the hiring manager is going to read the resume and will understand all the industry specific jargon.
I have had to tell SO MANY PEOPLE that the applicant tracking system and the recruiter have to read it and understand it first.
If someone not in your field wonât understand it, SPELL IT OUT.
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Yes! Always check spell check. Iâve received mail from the local department of pubic works and read a real estate ad that said a place had a big dick, great for entertaining!
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Michael McIntyre (British comedian) has a very funny routine about the differences in British, Australian, and New Zealand accents that includes a conversation with a New Zealand hotel clerk about the many features of the hotelâs lovely big dick. 
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Yes, but those errors, along with âa slip secondâ would not be caught by spell check. They are normal, correctly spelled words. They just donât belong in the expression.
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Maybe Iâm not understanding what you are saying. That was my point. When I taught, I always told students not to depend on spell check because properly spelled, but incorrect words would be missed.
Last night I was watching a show with a New Zealander whose pronunciations were being corrected. It was funny, he wanted an apartment with a nice disk and big bidroom.
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Over on a train wreck thread, someone is fulminating about QFP, Quoting For Prosperity. Thatâs a new one. Good example of not even thinking about what words mean.
If I had a dollar for every QFP Iâd made I could likely afford⊠Maybe a few bales of hay!!
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Another one with the incorrect version of the word⊠when someone gets another horse and posts about their ânewest editionâ
Itâs not a book or a newspaper. You are ADDING an animal to the herd. Itâs a new ADDITION.
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Someone in one of my offices (yes, I was an actual witness to this seeming apocryphal story) wrote a long letter that closed with âI hope you are not completely satisfied.â Meaning, of course, ânowâ. I donât know how she overlooked it, but we caught it at the printer.
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I love aghasted. My non-horsey husband knows its provenance and has heard me use it often enough that he now says it too, which cracks me up.
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