MetaFilter posts tagged with spelling and grammar

Literally?

the man of twists and turns — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:25:01 -0800

"10 Words You Literally Didn’t Know You Were Getting Wrong" The Millions:Prescriptivists vs. Descriptivists: The Fifth Edition of The American Heritage Dictionary The Atlantic: A Call for Spelling Standardization (or Is That Standardisation?) Language Log: The New Yorker vs. the descriptivist specter

Enough with the ad homonyms

divabat — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 10:20:44 -0800

Literacy Privilege: How I Learned to Check Mine Instead of Making Fun of People’s Grammar on the Internet. Also Part 2 and Part 3.

The Fruit of Dionysuis Thrax

unliteral — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 17:55:05 -0800

Best Grammar Blog of 2011 has been announced - A Clil To Climb. The competition was intense.

Open Source Language Checking Technology

brundlefly — Mon, 03 May 2010 13:23:11 -0800

After The Deadline is an open source spell/style/grammar checker from Automattic for WordPress, Firefox and other stuff. Here's a demo of the Firefox plugin and here's a (rather poor quality) presentation from WordCamp NYC 2009. I saw this guy's presentation at WordCamp SF and thought it was pretty neat.

MétaFiltre!

Shepherd — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 06:21:54 -0800

The Canadian Government’s Translation Bureau recently made its French/English/Spanish technical terminology database, Termium, free to access after over a decade as a subscription-based service. While off-the-cuff translations are often available from free services like BabelFish, Termium focuses on technical terminology such as scientific, medical and legal terms. Of equal interest to the core service are other tools like The Canadian Style, the government’s official rules for how to write "Canadian" (an odd hybrid of British and American styles), HyperGrammar 2, a series of educational grammar modules developed for self-directed learning, and Word Tailoring, an attempt to create a translation database for idiomatic French words and expressions that don't necessarily offer a single literal translation. There are also a wealth of French-language tools for learning grammar, improving your writing style, and seeking alternate terms for common verbs and expressions. Also worthy of note is the always-free Grand Dictionnaire, the product of the Quebec government's Office de la langue française, which is far less robust than Termium but has a stronger focus on "proper" language for Quebec. And, if you're struggling to improve your French writing skills, Bon Patron is a (frequently slow-loading) Java-powered tool that will check your French spelling and grammar and offer correction suggestions in real time.

hi cutie ur realy sexy. msn?

Kadin2048 — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:05:25 -0800

How (not) to write an online-dating message, based on a sample of 500,000 "first contact" messages. The average message from a man to a woman on OK Cupid has a 32% chance of getting a response. (Although longer is apparently better. Also, women seeking men, men seeking men, and women seeking women have somewhat better odds.) But not all messages are created equal: “netspeak, bad grammar, and bad spelling are huge turn-offs,” while the “top three most popular ways to say ‘hello’ were all actually bad beginnings.” OkTrends, the OK Cupid development/statistics blog, has come up previously. [Via Hacker News.]

I can’t believe that posting corrections to comments takes that much time away from real work.

blasdelf — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:59:53 -0800

So apostrophree corrects these kinds of errors before people see them, preventing employees from spending time posting corrections and engaging in online flame wars about English usage?

Errin' USA

Rhaomi — Wed, 21 May 2008 21:54:20 -0800

Immediately, Herson spotted an offense—a second-floor awning outside a tarot shop that advertised "Energy Stone's." They climbed the stairs to the second floor and approached a middle-age women with a quizzical expression. "We happened to notice the sign for energy stones," Deck said, "and there happens to be an extra apostrophe. 'Stone's' doesn't need the apostrophe."

"And?" she asked, her voice flat with annoyance.

"And we wanted to bring it to your attention," Deck said.

A look inside the daring lives of Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson, vanguards of the Typo Eradication Advancement League.

Get Your Red Pens Ready.

laconic titan — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 16:48:26 -0800

Zip up that dangling modifier--it's National Grammar Day! Let the ranting begin...

eBay Arctic Ale Ouchy

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 08:12:40 -0800

Man buys Allsop, relists it as Allsopp - proving that on eBay, presentation is everything. via b3ta

"Where's the 'T' at?" she asked.

staggernation — Thu, 03 May 2007 06:54:13 -0800

The caferteria had garbage an all tables. At my middle school in Staten Island, thought the dean, this cannot stand. So he sent home a letter.

A CAPTCHA for Internet Access

exogenous — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 20:22:54 -0800

A CAPTCHA to weed out certain potential users of the internet.

Tools for editors

etaoin — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 07:30:25 -0800

Tools for Editors. Find all kinds of useful language-related links; take a side trip to a site where you can recall the joys of diagramming sentences, corral misplaced apostrophes, check your spelling, set free pet peeves, or read lovely essays on the English language written by a retired professor of Dutch.

"I was very lucky that she triped over my uncontios body beried under piles of ash..."

Perigee — Fri, 11 Oct 2002 15:39:49 -0800

"I was very lucky that she triped over my uncontios body beried under piles of ash..." A saga of epic proportions: some moron living inside his "Morrowind" RPG computer game writes his gameplay out as a novel. Welcome to a capsule indictment of American education and the consequences of the new "American Way." Thank heavens we don't live in Morrowind, where most people can't "right nor reed."