Sloppy is as sloppy does.
As Seth Godin ponders “Google making us sloppy. “ We increasingly don’t worry about little things like spelling since we assume - correctly more often than not - that Google is brilliant and will give us results if we just get “close enough.” As a former Honors English student, I’m deeply disturbed (even though I’ve long forgotten a lot of the rules, they’re still rules.) But, the thought that really disturbs me is what if the people posting all that info are equally as sloppy? These days we’re doing everything from choosing doctors to making investment decisions based on that data.
Hmmmm. Yet another reason to check multiple sources and verify information. A date transposed, a few zeros in the wrong place and you could have big trouble.
View the Blog Roll
January 12th, 2006 at 12:51 pm
Very good observation. It’s not just people using the web who jump over the rules. Whatever happened to manners? Ethics? On and on. Sloppy is everywhere.
January 12th, 2006 at 2:45 pm
“Sloppy is everywhere.”
A great quote to follow “As a former Honors English student, I’m deeply disturbed (even though I’ve long forgotten a lot of the rules, they’re still rules.)”
I can’t tell if it is serious or not!
Douglas
January 12th, 2006 at 2:47 pm
Ah, and I believe rules are meant to broken. More to ponder!
January 13th, 2006 at 6:37 am
It may not be an increase in sloppiness at all. It could be that there are a whole lot more people communicating these days and therefore we see more people who open their mouths with their feet in them, grammatically speaking that is, people we would not have heard from 25 years ago. The circles we travel in today on the net have no boundaries as far as economic or social circumstances. Any of us can jump in fearlessly and participate. Want to talk about equality? The net may be the only place it is possible to live based on our merits, regardless of our wealth or education or who we know.
January 13th, 2006 at 9:55 am
Or, as a New Yorker cartoon noted, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog!”
I’m not hung up - as you can tell from reading this blog - on the rules of grammar. (To write “conversationally, one has to break some of the rules and write as people actually talk.) Everyone misspells a word here and there. I can never see my own typos. So it goes. However, people should learn how to effectively communicate (on the Web and elsewhere). Otherwise, they’ll get lost in the noise, even if they have a very useful point or perspective.