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Comment by make3 | Hacker News Reader

one guy deciding to change 90k articles unilateraly is kind of insane indeed.

i find grammar obsession on the internet to be insane overall. you ever use the wrong their/there/theyre and have some guy reply with some unhinged comment. such odd behavior

I don’t know about the unhinged comments, but grammar is important and people who don’t care are wrong not to care.

Thats just your opinion. if you understand me and i understand you then were good. my experience with grammar is that it just explains how we talk, like music theory. when your young and learning to speak, you just speak, your parent (probably) don't sit down with a white board and explain noun and complex verbs tenses at the age of four

I understand you, but it's more difficult than if you wrote correctly (according to my arseholish prescriptivist rules, if you like, yes) - you're communicating less effectively by not subscribing to the standard rules; I misread you, take longer to understand your meaning, it takes patience and begins to frustrate.

Also spoken language is looser. You can't hear the difference between "there," "their," and "they're" but your brain fills in the appropriate meaning. When you see it written though, there is a slight mental stumble as you initially parse the word as written, then understand that it's wrong, and make the appropriate mental substitution.

Spoken language is also different in that, as you correctly point out, it is at times more limited in how much information it contains, but also, in other ways it can be much richer in information than the equivalent writing. Things like nonverbal or tonality can contain a lot of helpful or contextually-relevant information that cannot be found in writing.

So writing and speaking, while having a lot of linguistic overlap, are just different beasts.

(Ironically I think my grammar in this comment is not great, but FYI English is not my first language-- I'd appreciate a correction if appropriate)

That's highly accent dependent।

I think I pronounce all three differently (Southern RP-ish (as in not farmer) BrE) but 'their' and 'they're' are close।

Rhotic AmE though clearly distinguishes those, and I can imagine them all sounding similar in that sort of accent।

Sorry, what things were good and when? Your young what?

If we were speaking out loud you could figure it out

We're not speaking. You might as well be saying "if things were different, they'd be different."

We're communincatng with English. What about things like ur to replace your or you're in text. None of you can figure that out?

It’s not about whether it’s possible to guess, it’s about whether it’s a good idea to be guessing in the first place.

And yet, we're not speaking out loud.

But you did understand him. You’re pretending you didn’t because if that were true it’d reinforce your point, but it’s not in fact true.

You can't possibly know whether or not I understood them.

I think I understood them, but I can never be sure, because in order to understand something with improper grammar, you usually need to "fill in the gaps" with the most reasonable assumptions possible, and those don't necessarily line up with your interlocutor's beliefs or intentions.

Putting words in other people's mouths is often required to "lubricate communication along", but it should be done as minimally as possible if the goal is for people to understand each other.

See Grice's cooperative principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle

Absolutely nonsensical bullshit. Everyone reading this knows you perfectly understood “were” to mean “we’re” here. Engaging in the fictional universe where you didn’t is a waste of time.

It's not bullshit, it's what explains a large class of misunderstandings.

What's bullshit is people who think they know what other people think.

Grammar is a linguistic study and more than just "like, a general guideline."

For example, "you're" and "your" are two very different words.

Let people obsess. They're not hurting you.

There's also a well-known thing about English in that it's culturally much less prescriptive about grammar than other languages. The American-English philosophy around grammar doesn't necessarily transpose to other grammars around the world.

American English is trying to do away with adverbs entirely! Sometimes I find myself shouting '-ly!' at the screen. (I just wanted to leave that comment here real quick.)

... They said, spending too much effort to try to insult me by going through my comment history and still missing the point of the original comment.

I didn't even look at your profile, if you've said 'real quick' or something similar before (or whatever it is you think I gleaned from there) it's a coincidence.

And in fact why would I have? I was replying to something someone else said in reply to you, not even related really except via parent to your GP comment.

Grammar is many things packed in one. For one, it can signal a bunch of things, like maturity, superficiality, seriousness, intelligence. The lack of tolerance, like in you're example, is likely just someone who wants to vent, not a genuine concern for grammar.

The other thing is that writing on the open internet means that potentially many people will read the writing. Good grammar is borne out of routine, but this only works if the people practice the right thing - if they practice the wrong thing, then next time they'll potentially do the wrong thing by habit. So really, good grammar depends on reading texts with good grammar. It's also how we pick up vocabulary. Putting these things together, I think people owe it to each other, and the collective humanity, that they produce quality writings on public places.

I think your putting to much importance on comments on the internet. These are throwaway thoughts. Non of us are changing the world with our comments here. It's just entertainment.

this is literally what wikipedia is for, so any one guy can change 90k articles unilaterally

Wait until AIs start making changes. Human editors won't be able to keep up.

It's just data.

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