From: evan@hpl.hp.com (Evan Kirshenbaum)
Newsgroups: alt.usage.english
Subject: Re: Improper spelling
Date: 2 Sep 92 22:54:12 GMT
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories

In article <92246.155543IO11412@MAINE.MAINE.EDU> <IO11412@MAINE.MAINE.EDU> writes:
>Why do so many people (especially native speakers of English) spell
>incorrectly the following forms:

>wierd    for      weird

is probably due to people having internalized the rule "'I' before 'E'
except after 'C' [unless sounded like 'ay' as in 'neighbor' and
'weigh']". 

>your's   for      yours
>he's     for      his
>it's     for      its
>our's    for      ours
>their's  for      theirs

is by analogy with "John's", etc.  BTW, I don't think I've ever seen
"he's" from someone who was not obviously a non-native speaker.

>its      for      it's

is due to the fact that spelling one of them with an apostrophe and
the other without was a really *stupid* (and, I believe, reasonably
recent) idea, and people forget which one is supposed to take it.
(They know that "one of those words that seems to need an apostrophe
arbitrarily doesn't take it--I wonder if this is the one".)

>tonite   for      tonight

is an example of one of the few real changes going on in English (or,
at least, American) orthography: the removal of "gh".  This one seems
to have been driven by advertising, but has been moving for a while.
I have seen (intentionally used) "nite","frite", "lite", "tho",
"thru", "laff", and "tuff", and in America, "donut" is common, and
"draft" is already the usual spelling of the British "draught".  I
should emphasize that such change goes slowly, but I would not be
surprised if in a hundred years, "tonight" looks as archaic as
"oeconomy".  

>acheive  for      achieve
>recieve  for      receive

shows that "ei/ie" seems to be one of the harder rules to get right
in English.  The rhyme is correct in these cases, however.

>your     for      you're

is like "their/there/they're" and "to/two/too".  Perhaps because all
of the words are so common, it is easy to confuse them.  In my own
case, I rarely miswrite them.  I do occasionally mistype them, but
that would seem to be more of a performance error in the process of
typing.  (In my linguistics classes we learned to listen to the words
people actually say as opposed to filtering for what they meant to
say.  The performance errors can be quite enlightening and amusing.)


>I don't mean the situations where someone uses an incorrect form when they
>know the correct spelling (e.g. thanx for thanks).
>Please don't answer with "linguistics should be descriptive, not prescrip-
>tive" or "language changes, so spelling does too".
>What I'm trying to focus on is the same problem that makes Dan Quayle spell
>"potatoe", and half of the high-school seniors in the state of X who don't
>know where Europe is on the map.
>What is the connection between these errors and the fact that people don't
>read books nowadays (almost) and that the overall cultural level tends if
>not to decrease, then at least to shift to a non-praiseworthy state.
>Let the flame war start!

I'm not going to touch that.

Evan Kirshenbaum
    HP Laboratories
    3500 Deer Creek Road, Building 26U
    Palo Alto, CA  94304

    kirshenbaum@hpl.hp.com
    (415)857-7572
Newsgroups: alt.usage.english