[Novalug] [OT] Free speech -- Your claim is not sincere

[Bonnie Dalzell]

On Mon, 20 Jul 2009, Nino Pereira wrote:
  Spelling mistakes are often typos that fell through
> the cracks, due to haste, dyslexia, immaturity, etc.. And, being born
> outside the US doesn't doom you spelling- or grammar-wise: Nabokov
> and Conrad are even better evidence than this mailing list.
>

A number of spelling mistakes are indeed typos. My impression, as an 
educated native born US-ian who suffers from casual spelling (American can 
also be construed as applying to those from other countries in the 
Americas) is that non-native speakers of United State English are 
frequently better at spelling and more likely to comment on the errors one 
produces.

Here is an interesting link discussing the use of hyphens in words in 
English.

http://englishplus.com/news/news0699.htm

It does disuss this from the point of view of usage as an evolving process 
rather than as a frozen set of always proper usages based on rigid laws.

My suspicion is that hyphens tend to be dropped from typed messages 
because inserting hyphen slows down typing. At least it slows me down.

Most people are not going to take the time to "consult a dictionary" 
on the matter of hyphens when typing messages for an active mailing list 
(excuse me mailing-list). :-)

Incidently when I finally got pine/alpine working locally on my computer 
I lost the spell checker, primitive as it may me. If anyone who uses 
pine or alpine and can help me get it working I would appreciate that.

>

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                        Bonnie Dalzell, MA
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