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When I was 18 and texting from my LG Chocolate, I had a girl double-check a drunken message I was attempting to text my boss at 1:30 in the morning trying to get out of work the next day. She shook her head as I watched Can’t Hardly Wait on my futon thinking that my text was going to be an abomination to the English language. When she handed my phone back to me, she looked astonished and remarked, “I don’t know how you just did that, but your grammar and spelling were impeccable.”
I hate when people don’t take the care to craft a perfectly acceptable text message. Though I blame AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger, it’s just too easy to fuck up words with the iPhone’s spell-check, except if you’re trying to type “fuck” and it changes to “duck.” That’s just a struggle we can all identify with.
Blend, a group-texting app based out of San Franciso, turned off their spell-check for 72 hours in an effort to see which words our generation struggles with the most. They took over 200,000 people between the ages of 16-24 and just roasted us. It was bad. Really bad.
Via Business Insider:
According to the company, some of the most frequently misspelled words were “weird,” “definitely” and “Budweiser.”
It’s definitely weird that these kids were spelling out “Budweiser” instead of just texting one another about grabbing some Bud Lights. What’s a matter with kids today?
In two of those cases, users were betrayed by the classic classroom rule-of-thumb “‘i’ before “e” except after ‘C,'” misspelling “weird” as “wierd” and “Budweiser” as “Budwieser.” Meanwhile, “definitely” often emerged as the similarly spelled adverb “defiantly.”
If you have a driver’s license and continually mix up “definitely” and “defiantly,” you’re scum to me.
The company also sorted the results by region and found some interesting discrepancies. Users on the West Coast of the US seemed to struggle with double letters, disproportionately dropping a “u” from “vacuum” and an “s” from “possession,” resulting in “vacum” and “possesion.”
I’m just imagining a bunch of West Coast surfer bros asking each other to “vacum seal the weed” and how to get out of “possesion” charges.
They also struggled to place the pesky “u” in “restaurant,” typing “restaraunt” more often than their East Coast counterparts.
As someone that got that word in his 5th grade spelling bee and knocked it out of the park, I can’t fathom not being able to spell that word as a 24-year-old.
East Coasters had similar difficulties: “Embarrassing” shed an “r” to become “embarassing,” while the “silicon” in “Silicon Valley” gained an extra “l” as “sillicon.” They also stumbled with “Yuengling” — a Pennsylvania brewery with a German name — often spelling it phonetically as “Yingling.”
It’s kind of harsh to expect a bunch of drunk 16 to 24-year-olds to spell Yuengling. My friends and I use the phonetic alphabet to refer to various beers, so instead of “Yuengling,” I’d ask by buddy to pick up a case of “Yankees.” The same goes for Lima Bravo Limas (Labatt Blue Lights) and Bud Lights (Bravo Limas).
Despite their orthographic transgressions, users can point to a silver lining to shield themselves from stodgy critics. Some of English’s most notorious misusages — think “your” and “you’re;” “there,” “their” and “they’re;” and “alot” and the preferred “a lot” — were among the words most often followed by an asterisk, which texters use to acknowledge a mistake.
Yet in grade school, we learned more about chlorophyll than how to properly use their/there/they’re. Damn it all to hell. .
[via Business Insider]
Image via Unsplash
Chlorophyll? More like Borophyll, right guys?
I definetly struggle with the word “definitely”.
I see what you did they’re.
Ashamed to admit I am on team “definately”.
Now I want some Bravo Lima Limas.
“Mayonnaise” fucked me in my 5th grade spelling bee. The other kid got cabinet. Cabinet!
Goddamn our generation is going so downhill………..Why can’t we just speel properly?!
IF YOU CAN’T SPELL THE BEER YOU SHOULDN’T BE DRINKING IT. PLAIN AND SIMPLE.
Our rival sorority (only other tier 1 at ECU) uses this app so I won’t even touch it : 0
Elitism from an ECU student…