Being elitist about both music and writing

I kvetched about this a while back, but given the surfeit of posts that are rife with grammatical errors and misspellings of late, I think I need to re-kvetch about people who call themselves elitists, yet can’t spell/write.

I know that some people give me a hard time about correcting people’s grammar (though evidently, they feel no need to correct me when I make equally ridiculous mistakes and misspell a word like detritus. Humph.), but most of the times, I don’t do this to be mean or obnoxious. Some people don’t like this, but I tend to learn quicker from mistakes, so I appreciate when people point out my mistakes. But really. I know FB isn’t exactly schoolwork, but is it too much to ask people to write discussion posts with basic but proper spelling and grammar? I’m not talking about being witty or using big words or making oblique allusions to Chaucer. I’m talking about basic grammar that one learns at the junior high school level--i.e. no run-on sentences (unless you were schooled overseas), proper distinction of it’s vs. its, and certainly not ten misspellings in one post.

Nor am I talking about occasional typos. We all make mistakes, and heaven knows, with this spell-check turned off, I’ve caught myself making more typos than I’d really like. I also confess to not being able to spell many composers’ names. (e.g. Schumann) But really, people. All it takes is 30 seconds to reread your post to check for spelling errors. With the advent of auto spell-check, there really should be no excuse for 10 typos.

And while I’m on the topic of posting etiquette, perhaps this is a FB culture thing, and perhaps it's antediluvian of me to expect people to not write like they are texting, but i also don’t like it when you do not punctuate sentences properly. i see this sort of thing all the time on various boards and quite frankly, it drives me batty. i’m sure you know that i should be capitalized, but since i don’t know whether you are illiterate or trying to be cute, you might as well err on the safe side and write sentences the way you were taught in grammar school.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, it’s really anyone’s prerogative to post however (un)intelligently he wishes, but I find it really hard to take someone’s enthusiastic endorsement of Eric Satie’s brilliant piece seriously, if he can’t take the time to check their post for basic errors.

In one of my groups, one poster is currently getting a lot of flak from other members for his posts (though truth be told, some of them are not exactly in the position to cast stones either. Nor am I, actually. . ..).

He is a high school student, and part of me wants to cut high school students some slack. On the other hand, I don’t think expecting a high school student to spell properly is really asking too much.

However, as much as I’m inclined to quickly judge people based on their writing ability, it occurred to me that this particular person might be slightly autistic or might have LD. Both of my brothers have LD, and his posts scream LD to me.

This is part of the difficulty with these online forums where you don’t necessarily know who you’re dealing with—you have imperfect information with which to make judgment.

So perhaps this person has LD and we shouldn’t be so hard on him, but as for the rest of us, (especially people who call themselves elitists, whether tongue-in-cheek or otherwise), please run spell-check if spelling is not your forte.

Sincerely,*
Your fascist fellow group member

*Apologies to Sofiya for writing “sincerely” instead of “sincerely yours”. This is evidently an Americanism that drives her nuts, but the way I see it, I like to sign my letters “sincerely” rather than “sincerely yours”, because while I mean everything I write sincerely (and hence my signing off “sincerely”), 99 percent of the time, I really don’t care to be “yours” or anyone’s. If I write Rumsfeld a letter enumerating the various blunders he made in Iraq, I’m sure I’ll be perfectly sincere, but I’ll be damned if I ever sign off any letter to him “sincerely yours”.