I’ve noticed that I tend to dismiss the opinions of poorly spelled, or punctuated comments on blogs and forums.
Initially I assumed this was because if they could not be bothered to show the respect of putting the basic effort to use a capital “I”, and use the correct “there”/”their” and so forth, then they were less worthy of my respect.
However, I now have a new theory. There’s a bit of my brain which filters spam. Most spam has grammatical and spelling errors in which means I’ve come to hit delete automatically on things which have more than a few spelling, punctuation and grammar mistakes and aren’t directly addressed to me.
Dave has extended this theory; he thinks that someone in Nigeria deeply cares about proper use of the English language, and is sending out thousands of poorly constructed junk messages for the sole purpose of forcing the world to use correct spelling, and so forth, if they want to be taken seriously. Agent provocateurs of the Grammar Nazis?
