I just say "aim it at the audience". Now, this is difficult, because there'll be somewhat of a drift where less literate contributions (as in you/you're and "could of" offenders, who don't mean badly) contribute to an otherwise normally literate and intelligent context, as well as the guys who insist on proper capitalisation upon a forum whose current 'flavour' is to ignore all that... Sadly, I suspect there's more 'drift down' than 'drift up', although I've also seen 'drift way-up!' when pedanticism pedanticness pedanticity a picky attitude goes viral.
But on a forum such as this, with its current intellectual quotient, I'd heavily suggest that anyone still with a confusion about "your" and "you're"[1] overcome their oversight. I have been known to PM people with advice about this confusion (and other similar ones), but I usually hate myself for it in the cold light of day immediately after sending that. I really hate it when the reply I get back is "English is not my first language!", but that also tends to surprise me, as people in that position tend to not make such mistakes (and their posts are otherwise indistinguishable from an educated native-anglophone). Whether by a bad background in school, laziness or deliberate affectation, most offenders are English (or equivalent, but mostly English or American) through-and-through.
But I can read txtspk lk a n8tv f i wnt to, 45 \/\/311 4Z 1337 5p34k 4 7h0z p|_4C3Z 7h@ |2I73 !7. Forgive me if I dislike those who carry this habit (in a non-exemplar way!) onto 'proper' forums, though.
I have so many other things that I'm annoyed about (some of which are already mentioned), but I'll forgo that, as one of the bad internet habits that I have is rambling on and on and on and on... Case in point: the above and the footnotes below.
Noodle: Magma, yes?
[1] I have a theory about this... Possessives normally are apostrophised (Starver's post, Noodle's thread) and that kicks some otherwise well-grammared individuals into picking the wrong choice. Certainly this has been the case for me with possessive "its" (as opposed to contracted "it's <= it is"), before it was pointed out to me that "it's", "he's", "she's", "they's", "us's", "you's", are all (by way of being earlier solidified in language before current language rules[2] might well have re-standardised them as other than "its", "his", "hers", "their", "our" and "your". In fact, I have a tendency to additionally use "ones" ("belongs to one", where "one" is the indefinite person, or first person if you're using language like the Queen or Margaret Thatcher[3]), because I think that this particular usage of "one" fits much better with the "irregular grouping" than with the workaday regular possessive transformations.
[2] Oh, and I pay little head to the "Language is always changing!" argument, especially when it comes to justify "could of" usage. There's logical morphing according to new needs (the invention of new terms for new technologies/applications of technology), and in the old days there was a lot of ignorant and illiterate morphing, but there's no real excuse for most of the 'illiterate morphing' you see in this day and age.
[3] It'd still be "One's Complement" in computing, or any other instance where the digit (or value) is being described.
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Topic: Internet habits which annoy you. (Read 97348 times)