5 ms·
The original title is "Switzerland bores underground". I'm fine with a different title, but please replace "it's" with "its". Thanks, and sorry for nitpicking.
by merraksh 10y ago
The original title is "Switzerland bores underground". I'm fine with a different title, but please replace "it's" with "its". Thanks, and sorry for nitpicking.
- raverbashing 10y agoWhen I saw the title and the domain I knew the title had been changed because no average Swiss would do such a stupid mistake as to get its and it's confused
- gpvos 10y agoIt is indeed a mistake that is almost only made by native English speakers, which is in itself an interesting phenomenon.
- dnet 10y agoIMHO it's because you learn your first language spoken first, written after -- and most people learn further languages after they learned writing, so they can learn to differentiate between words that sound similar/same.
- wolfgke 10y agoAnother hypothesis could be that in the culture surrounding other languages (as Russian or German) grammar and spelling mistakes are much more frowned upon than in the English-speaking countries.
- nerdponx 10y agoAnti-intellectualism in general is an old and interesting phenomenon in English-speaking countries.
- lazyjones 10y agoPerhaps it's because native English speakers more frequently communicate with English-speaking people in an informal setting (where such mistakes happen more often and are copied), whereas non-native speakers tend to read English mostly in edited publications etc. and (more sloppily) communicate with friends in their native language.
- raverbashing 10y agoWhile it is true that yes, people in general communicate more sloppily in informal settings it doesn't mean they don't know the formal way of writing (at least for common terms) German dialects are pretty far from the "official" language, but everybody knows that
- sievebrain 10y agoYou're assuming its vs it's is always due to lack of knowledge. Sometimes it's just a brainfart. I noticed today that I had sent an email that used the wrong form of "to" ("too" instead). This isn't because I don't know English. It's just that what came out of my fingers was wrong. Mea culpa, it happens. The way English uses the apostrophe is especially tedious and offers no value: it'd be no real shame if the distinction between "its" and "it's" disappeared over time, just like English lost gendered nouns and words like thy and thine.
- raverbashing 10y agoOh brainfarts and autocorrects do happen, but by the frequency I see this mistake happening I see it's not just a regular slip
- sievebrain 10y agoYou probably see a lot more English than other languages, so you'll see a proportionally higher number of mistakes too.
- GirlsCanCode 10y agoWell @dang didn't notice or care.
- ghaff 10y agoNote that even people who fully know correct usage do type the wrong thing now and then. It's particularly easy to do when you're basically transcribing a sentence that you're verbalizing silently to type the wrong homonym. I very rarely to never mix up things like loose and lose but I will mistype things like its and it's from time to time even though I fully know the correct one.
- lazyjones 10y agoThanks for nitpicking. I'm always tempted to do this, but reluctant because most people probably don't care. I'm a firm believer in the hypothesis that such mistakes are "contagious" and thus more harmful than one would think.
- CalRobert 10y agoThey are indeed. I find myself inadvertently typing "loose" when I mean "lose" and it's absolutely maddening. Similarly, I do a double-take when I see "effect" used properly.
- solipsism 10y agoThe problem is that English overloads the apostrophe for possession and contraction. It's annoying.