> Are you having difficulty understanding Scott's message or intent?
I assume Scott's either dumb or careless. If public communication isn't your thing, how hard is it to find someone to proofread your message when you're working at a corporation? In either case he's not the person Adobe should have handling a PR situation.
> I think a lot of time is wasted on perfecting spelling/grammar because of comments like the one above.
I'm very sympathetic to an engineer or scientist having issues like this, perhaps working in fields where people from all over the world will be working together. On the other hand, if you're working in customer care, written and verbal communication is your thing. If you're not good at it, that reflects on you and your company and the seriousness with which they take the customer care function.
Poor communication started the problems here with this customer so it is an especially touchy subject for Adobe. Hence the way people are reacting.
edit: wow, mhurron, why not interact with what people have actually written in its full and intended context instead of assuming the worst about people and knocking over a strawman?
>I think a lot of time is wasted on perfecting spelling/grammar
Are you sure about that? Scour any comments section for 10 minutes and it should be clear that not enough time is being used to perfect spelling/grammar.
>Are you having difficulty understanding Scott's message or intent?
No, but that doesn't mean we should settle for the lowest common denominator.
I think you mean "greatest common factor".
"Lowest common denominator" is in fact the ideal format for clear, accurate expression of computation.
"Lowest common denominator" is what people say when they don't understand what the original term means, and think "lowest" must be worse than "greatest".
Lowest common denominator is a phrase with different meanings in different contexts. It means the LCD in maths (used for simplifying fractional arithmetic) and it also means the "basest form of something which all members of a population are able to comprehend/use".
There is a loose commonality in the usage but the term "lowest common denominator" as used here is not the mathematical term. GCF is a mathematical analogy but doesn't work as a direct usage as it would be unclear what the "factor" is that the people are to hold in common whilst in the original phrase it's clear that the denominator (standard) to be held in common is the sum of language understood [and used correctly] by all. It is lowest because greater ones can be achieved by excluding proportions of the population that has been used to establish the standard.
Whilst I couldn't care less the real meaning I've always assumed that "I could care less" is a shorthand for something along the lines of "I could care less but that's too much effort given how little I care about it". YMMV.
All language can be misunderstood by those who wish to misunderstand it.
I think a lot of time is wasted trying to interpret comments with spelling/grammar problems. Every time I see something like 'should of' instead of 'should have', my brain trips out and I have to re-read the sentence.
For a typical blog post, the amount of effort required to get it right is minuscule in comparison to the number of eyes which will (hopefully) read it. For a public relations employee, it's just a matter of professionalism.
I'm beginning to get used to this particular error, but it's the kind of error that is often quite difficult to understand for non-native speakers (because you have to pronounce the comment, with the right accent, to be able to guess the meaning).
I think it's a matter of etiquette and professionalism. I don't get huffy about minor misspellings most of the time, but this conversation took place in a professional context. Imagine a scenario where you discover that several thousand dollars are missing from your bank account. You don't want them to reply with, "lol, sry bro... much stolen funds, wow fraud... we'll look into that... l8r"
When talking with friends I'd probably find that kind of banter (when used in moderation) to be amusing, but I expect a business person to take the time to proofread and spellcheck a message before sending it to me. I'm paying them money, they should show me a little courtesy.
Actually, yes. Everybody makes mistakes, but this one is so common that it has started to bother me. It immediately distracted me from the article and therefore his message.
I actually see native speakers make the "should of" mistake far more often than I see non-native speakers make it, probably because it's a mistake based on pronunciation. Native speakers often incorrectly spell based on pronunciation, while non-native speakers often incorrectly pronounce based on spelling. In fact, the (presumably native-speaking) author of the linked blog post makes such a mistake - he uses the word "manor" where he should have used "manner." Frequent signs of non-native English are improper verb conjugation and article placement, rather than something like "should of."
100% correct. Also, non-native speakers tend to make grammar errors, use idioms wrongly, etc. They (we) don't tend to mistake "to/too", "there/their/they're" and "your/you're", because second languages are usually acquired through the written word.
Well, I do sometimes make the mistakes you give as examples, but only as I get very tired, when I curiously start to mix up all kinds of homophones and near-homophones with no apparent connection (particularly curious to me since, as you suggested, I picked up English primarily through writing; it's not like I have a habit of sounding out words. It took many years from I started reading and writing English until I ever used it in a spoken conversation)
For the same reason I can't ever see me using "should of" - it sounds too wrong.
It is rarer for me to make the mistakes you list than mixing up completely unrelated homophones, though, as they're definitively ones I'm extra aware of.
In parts of England "should of" is in common use amongst younger speakers to the extent that "should of" to me is associated with South or East London more than non-native speakers (though it's in use many other places in England too).
My four year old might occasionally use it because his friends does, and he knows it drives his mother absolutely crazy when she notices he uses South London dialect features.
I always thought the use of "should of" is because people like to shorten "should have" to "should've", especially in conversation. This seems to have lead to people mistakenly thinking "should've" when spoken is actually "should of". Not sure how people can read "should of" and not think it makes no sense though.
* my grammar is most likely not great either, so I can't really criticise to be honest!
This veiled attack on someone because of what their name may imply makes my stomach turn.
I've sometimes wondered whether those who are most passionate about bashing other languages and frameworks, are in fact, just using transferring the behaviour from more direct bias towards a group or person.
I hesitated in making a joke on HN, since that never works well here. I was actually making fun of the practice of having Indian call center employees go by ridiculous American sounding names that couldn't possibly be theirs.
I always have to chuckle when you get someone on the line, and they say "my name is 'Scott'", and you have to think, "No, its not." I thought that was what the parent meant by "Scott". As in, that's not his real name.
It was not an attack on anyone other than the people that run these call centers. Most of the comments thought I was picking on grammar or something, which wouldn't have been very funny.
I love jokes. My sense of humor is such, that it doesn't have to take shots at people for things they can do nothing about: the colour of their skin, their looks, their height, the name they're given, how they didn't choose the families they were born into.
Still, let's chill out. And process the half hearted apology of "sorry if anyone was offended, but not sorry I said it because I don't see the big deal".
I wasn't really that upset by you putting a reasonably accurate looking and long south indian name..
It did made me wonder if doing so was really that evolved from making up a willfully ignorant African or Asian inspired name 30-60 years ago. That, in turn, made me wonder if we're really progressing, and what made me write.
What's a joke to me, is how little empathy there is when someone is told to change their name to make it more acceptable and easier to pronounce because they're not worth knowing.
Maybe it'll start getting better when narrow minded thinking stops telling the world to be more open minded to tolerate their continued close-mindedness.
I was hoping for a successful resolution to the story at that point, given he was apparently meeting the sales guy at his palatial home.