TOT: edicashon

[williamwright]

I always thought my education was largely a waste of time, but then social media came along. Now I know that school gave me and many of my age group some massive advantages over a lot of other people. I know what commas are and I have a reasonable idea of how to deploy them. I also have the weird ability to break up what I write into sentences instead of scribbling one long unpunctuated scrawl. What?s more I know that my sentences should have some sort of coherent structure. I know that sentences and proper nouns always start with capital letters. I know that with any piece of writing it?s usually best to start at the beginning, and then do the middle bit, and then add the ending, rather than start with a load of incomprehensible blather about the emotional consequences of an event and then give at best a vague account of the event itself. I can?t spell for toffee, but I do know I should take notice when the computer underlines a word in red, and I also know that ?color?, ?favorite?, and ?behavior? are actually foreign words and should never be used. Thank you Mrs Boyd (née Beveridge), Miss Ecclestone, Mr Leech (the bloodsucker), Miss Whitehouse, Mr Leary, Mr ?Dinky? Dalton, Mrs Holman, and Mr ?Chopper? Akehurst. Between you, you did a great job. But I wonder: were you the last of your kind?

BIll

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

+1

I often just give the struggle, when trying to interpret someones desperate plea for help, when they cannot be bothered to make something at least understandable.

[Tim Streater]

Setting the default language to be UK English in your copy of Word will help here.

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

Tim Streater formulated the question :

Does the Word spellcheck work with browsers apart from the MS browsers? I had to add a spelling checker to Firefox.

[The Other John]

The lack of 'proper' education these days is constantly shown by people who don't know the difference between there, their and they're. Another pet hate of mine (and there are many!) is the use of your instead of you're -grrrr! Then there's misuse of personal pronoun as in 'You and me could do so-and-so', or 'so-and-so could be done by you and I'.

[alan_m]

I've just read such a post on social media. I life history about irrelevant medial problems just to ask where the local vaccination centre is located.

[alan_m]

And then set it to UK English?

[Chris Hogg]

And you could probably do all of that before you were a teenager!

[GB]

The lack of punctuation and capitalisation is partly down to people typing on phones. It's much easier to get those right with a proper keyboard.

[Andrew]

Our maths teacher was nicknamed Biffo (the bear). He had a deadly aim with the board rubber

[Andrew]

your and you're

[The Natural Philosopher]

I had to end a call to someone whose speech was so 'Estuary wog' that I was absolutely unable to understand what she was saying.

That is the only time I have ever been defeated.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Then you can burgle, instead of burglarize.

[Chris Green]

I don't think Bill ever was a teenager! :-)

[Peter Johnson]

+1 (About 20 years ago I was working with some younger people, one of whom was amazed when she realised that I was adding a column of figures without using a calculator.)

[JNugent]

Great idea.

I shall add my own thanks to Miss (almost certainly Mrs) Davies in the Infants' department and Miss Dillon and Mr "Johnny" Moran in primary school. Johnny was also pretty hard-driven on pupils having good cursive handwriting and there was a time when I could do that. But all these decades later, my handwriting is like a doctor's script. But I know where a semi-colon goes.

But I was over 30 and already in possession of a university degree before I learned (by chance) that the possessive "its" doesn't contain an apostrophe.

[JNugent]

Indeed. Almost certainly by the age of 10.

[JNugent]

Or on an on-screen "keyboard" set to UK English (iPad, iPhone, etc.).

[The Other John]

and use transport instead of transportation!

[Tim Streater]

What do browsers have to do with it?