OT: pathetic educational standards (was OT: Sci-fi, was RE: Ultra-portable terminals)

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike Schwartz (PC Support)" <mschw at athenet.net>
To: "'filePro Mailing List'" <Filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
Sent: Sunday, July 30, 2006 10:47 PM
Subject: RE: OT: Sci-fi (was RE: Ultra-portable terminals)


>> On Sun, 30 Jul 2006, Fairlight wrote:
>> >
>> > Amen.  What's up with the hostility, folks?  :)
>>
>> I'll admit to being overtaken with irony, at least, if not hostility, by
>> people grumbling about what "kids these days" are being taught, or not,
>> while botching up punctuation usage.
>>
>> Regards,
>> ....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.
>
>     Jesting aside between Bob and I and others who like to catch each 
> other
> with an occasional error, it's disheartening for me to have to work with a
> lot of these young people who have no excuse for not getting enough
> education to be able to write a half way intelligible business email or 
> memo
> to their customers.  I'm not talking about inner city ghetto kids or
> learning disabled kids.  These are all medium size Midwestern towns where 
> I
> know that they had ample opportunities to get a good education.

The thing that gets me even more is tv news anchors who's only job is to 
communicate and they get paid $$$$$ for it, and yet can't be bothered to 
learn that there is no such word as nucular.
They may not be nuclear physicists, but no one can say that word is not an 
important word in our collective vocabulary today. It's just slop and theres 
no excuse for it.
Then there are politicians who make the same errors. Regarding them it just 
scares me to think of such dumb people with the big scary buttons in their 
hands.
It might not seem like an important thing, how to spell potato. Well, it's 
not in most contexts. But what it is is there is just no excuse for it.

It's not really wrong to point out such things as punctuation errors.
When someone complains that I pointed out something they felt was silly to 
care about, because it's obvious to them and so anyone who doesn't 
understand them must be an idiot or anal to the point of 
counterproductivity, I ask them
When your car goes off the edge of the cliff and then your doctor doesn't 
know how to fix your smashed up body, because the mechanic got the 
instructions for fixing breaks and the doctor got the instructions for 
fixing brakes, how do you feel about sloppy communication then?

I don't mind most spelling and grammar things in casual conversation though. 
Especially things that are clearly the result of manual dexterity and skill 
at say, typing. Typo's aren't the result of sloppy thinking.
They are still a problem but only when anything important hinges on the 
typing. So I carefully re-check my typing when writing directions and 
program code. I don't always bother in casual email. I never bother in chat.

Using the completely wrong word, whether spalled perfectly or not is 
something I find almost inexcusable.
Your happy daughter?
You're happy daughter?
Two uttlerly un-similar sentences. It matters which way you spelled "you*"
Maybe you make a typo and manage to say yur or yu're.
Fine. At least you were thinking clearly and attempted to communicate 
clearly, and a purely mechanical error crept in. A certain percentage of 
those are unavoidable.


Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
+++++[>+++[>+++++>+++++++<<-]<-]>>+.>.+++++.+++++++.-.[>+<---]>++.
filePro  BBx    Linux  SCO  FreeBSD    #callahans  Satriani  Filk!