Ever got confused by non-standard capitalisation/spelling?

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whiterat
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06 Oct 2011, 7:12 am

To give an example which just happened, I saw in my news feed: Rip Steve Jobs. For a while I wondered: Why would this person in my friend list want to rip (as in the verb) Steve Jobs? Then I realised he meant "R.I.P. Steve Jobs".



hanyo
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06 Oct 2011, 7:36 am

What I Hate Is When People Type Like This. I Then Read It Emphasizing Each Word With A Pause Between Which Is Very Annoying.

Iaslohatewhenpeopletypelikethisandusuallydontevenbothertryingtoreadit.



kc8ufv
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06 Oct 2011, 11:07 am

hanyo wrote:
Iaslohatewhenpeopletypelikethisandusuallydontevenbothertryingtoreadit.

It is also quite annoying when people TALK like this. Makes it quite difficult to understand. Some people don't understand there should be the slightest pause between their words, just enough to separate them.



abc123
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06 Oct 2011, 11:37 am

It tends to be when I hear things verbally and they make no sense and I realise I have misheard a word as another word e.g. I heard man with no pants (which was a little surprising) and it was actually man with notepad.
I probably do but can't think of an example. Minute confuses me as it usually means time but sometimes means very small and I always see it as the time one.



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06 Oct 2011, 11:50 am

Yes. I consider "videogames" to be a misspelling. No one can convince me otherwise.

hanyo wrote:
What I Hate Is When People Type Like This...

And it must be awfully tedious to do it, too! Why they even bother...



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06 Oct 2011, 12:00 pm

hanyo wrote:
What I Hate Is When People Type Like This. I Then Read It Emphasizing Each Word With A Pause Between Which Is Very Annoying.

Iaslohatewhenpeopletypelikethisandusuallydontevenbothertryingtoreadit.



I agree -__-.

I always complain to my friends for using incorrect spelling/grammar :P



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06 Oct 2011, 2:48 pm

If someone types "Rip Steve Jobs" instead of "R.I.P. Steve Jobs," it's their illiteracy that's the problem, not our Asperger's.

But yes, I get annoyed and confused often by what I feel to be poor spelling or grammar. The most common annoyance for me is when a writer doesn't use as many commas as he should, so I don't know where the sentence is supposed to "pause."



whiterat
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07 Oct 2011, 12:00 am

Saw this headline in the paper today:

NUS (National University of Singapore) falls six places in THE rankings

I can recognise acronyms like UN, US, UK and PETA very quickly, but not THE for Times Higher Education. So when I read the headline out in my mind, I stressed the THE.

abc123 wrote:
Minute confuses me as it usually means time but sometimes means very small and I always see it as the time one.

I understand "minute" is pronounced differently when it means different things. Is that related to your confusion?

Jory wrote:
The most common annoyance for me is when a writer doesn't use as many commas as he should, so I don't know where the sentence is supposed to "pause."

Some people have said that sometimes I can write very long sentences. Now when I am typing something (what I do more often than actually writing these days), every now and then I pause and see if I have enough commas in my text.



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07 Oct 2011, 2:45 am

I do for a moment and then I figure it out.


Lot of people get annoyed by this stuff because it makes it so hard to read and harder to understand. Same as lack of punctuation. I will avoid long posts with poor grammar and spelling or lack of punctuation.

I also hate text speak, ugh. I see that as laziness and this is the forum, not a phone talking to another person who is also using their phone to chat with them.

I ALSO DO NOT LIKE IT WHEN PEOPLE TYPE LIKE THIS. IT MAKES IT HARDER FOR ME TO READ BECAUSE I FIND IT TOO DISTRACTING BECAUSE OF ALL THESE BIG LETTERS. I HAVE A HARD TIME CONCENTRATING ON WHAT I AM READING HERE. PLUS IT FEELS LIKE IT'S A STRAIN ON MY EYES TO EVEN SEE THIS CRAP. ALSO THE FACT IT HURTS. I WILL SKIP IT TOO IF IT'S TOO LONG. IF YOU READ ALL THIS, GOOD FOR YOU.



abc123
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07 Oct 2011, 7:09 pm

whiterat wrote:
Saw this headline in the paper today:

NUS (National University of Singapore) falls six places in THE rankings

I can recognise acronyms like UN, US, UK and PETA very quickly, but not THE for Times Higher Education. So when I read the headline out in my mind, I stressed the THE.

abc123 wrote:
Minute confuses me as it usually means time but sometimes means very small and I always see it as the time one.

I understand "minute" is pronounced differently when it means different things. Is that related to your confusion?

It does look like "the" rather than Times Higher Education

Yes minute/minute are said differently but spelt the same. When it's written down it is only the context that is different but I always read the time one in my head.

Those capitals just make my brain hurt! 8O



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07 Oct 2011, 8:30 pm

I don't mind so much, unless it's a glaring error like the Rip you mentioned. Sometimes what is "supposed" to be capitalized seems randomly ambiguous to me. I often can't tell when to and when not to.

Also, different rules apply to different native languages, so when I see what I think are errors I keep in mind that English may not be the writer's native tongue. German, for example, requires all nouns to be capitalized. Some Germans are so in the habit of doing so, the habit follows in their typing of English. Asians that normally use symbols only for words, and not phonetic alphabets, might find English capitalization rules very confusing. Why wouldn't they? I grew up writing English and I'm STILL confused by it.

I use capitalization for emphasis on phpBB forums like this, only because I find it highly inconvenient to use italicizing or bolding. It's so much QUICKER and CONVENIENT to just use the shift key. It does annoy SOME other users though. I know because they've told me, but I don't let it bother me since there are also a lot of forums out there that DON'T have any other way to emphasize words. Capitalization works on ALL forums, so it's a habit I can use that works for all of them. No need to THINK about which type of forum I'm on. :wink:


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whiterat
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07 Oct 2011, 9:13 pm

MrXxx wrote:
Also, different rules apply to different native languages, so when I see what I think are errors I keep in mind that English may not be the writer's native tongue. German, for example, requires all nouns to be capitalized. Some Germans are so in the habit of doing so, the habit follows in their typing of English. Asians that normally use symbols only for words, and not phonetic alphabets, might find English capitalization rules very confusing. Why wouldn't they? I grew up writing English and I'm STILL confused by it.
It happens I am an Asian. The other languages I read are Chinese and Japanese. No capitals in Chinese because each character is a word. No capitals in Japanese too, but each "character" is a syllable.

By the way, did you study linguistics, or are you very interested different sets of language rules? I notice you mentioned English, German and Asian languages in the part I chose to quote above.



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07 Oct 2011, 9:35 pm

I don't mind reading things so much. Of course I do have disgraphia, so I'm used to decoding my own oddly-capitalized misshapen handwriting constantly. Compared to that, text of any variety is pretty simple.

However, it does drive me crazy listening to people who want to try to "multitask" talking and doing something else. It's mostly because there tend to be more than ten seconds between each sentence.




So in the meantime, I assume the person is done talking to me and I try to move on to something else.




BUT THEN, like a knife cutting through the all-too-perfect silence, the ANNOYING voice of someone telling me all of the silly features of their smart phone pierces through my stream of thought!

ARRRR!
My room mate has been at it for twenty minutes now! I don't care about her stupid I-phone 4S features! I don't care about facebook! I keep trying to have a two-way conversation, but it doesn't work because she is just interested in her phone. She's not actually interested in talking to me at all! Is it rude if I just shut the bedroom door so that I don't have to listen to her talk to me about it from the kitchen?
I'm just kidding. I know the answer to that question.



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08 Oct 2011, 2:22 am

I've read enough poor writing to be confused by proper writing. No joke! Whenever I see the right version of something (their vs there), or other such things, I am forced to read it multiple times, knowing that I'm reading the right version of it while doing so, just to process it.


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whiterat
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10 Oct 2011, 10:06 pm

Fo-Rum wrote:
I've read enough poor writing to be confused by proper writing.
In what context do you read poor writing?