This lady is an English teacher who's been roasting incels by correcting their grammar...

[demmiblue]

Link to tweet

[Disaffected]

1. Hey, we could use a little of her here.

How about the position of Grammar and Spelling Moderator?

[wnylib]

2. I blame autocorrect.

[LiberalFighter]

11. Autocorrect is a problem on cell phone. Android?

Not so much on a computer.

[vanlassie]

30. I think you meant plurals of "cell phone" and

“Android”. … Baby doll.

[LiberalFighter]

35. Wellllll most people use just one cell phone at a time. 😄

[Marthe48]

66. You'd think!

lol

[wnylib]

42. I post from an android.

[Disaffected]

31. Coupled with lack of proof reading

before posting. Also coupled with lack of proof reading after posting (one good purpose of the Edit function).

I dunno - correcting errors whether from autocorrect or simple misspelling strikes me as a courtesy to other members and something that strives for improved clarity. Paraphrasing an old saying - If it's worth posting, it's worth posting well....

[wnylib]

44. I am guilty of sometimes not proofing.

However, my cell sometimes changes a word when I hit "post" after I've proofed the text. For example, I type "were" and proofread what I've written. Looks fine, so I hit "post" and later I see that the word appears with an apostrophe added to read "we're."

Most of my posts indicate that they have been edited once or twice because I catch the change afterward. Sometimes I don't catch it.

[wnylib]

52. PS. In 6th grade I was a finalist from my school

Last edited Tue May 21, 2024, 01:10 AM - Edit history (1)

in the National Spelling Bee contest, but lost at the local level when given a completely unfamiliar word.

After high school, before college, I worked as a proofreader for an advertising directory publisher. I also worked in the AV department of an ad agency, typing and proofing scripts for producers who created radio and TV commercials (and occasionally being a soundboard to give feedback on their word choices).

In college, I tutored students in freshman composition at the college's learning center. I never took the course or its sequel, analysis of literature, because I passed both CLEP exams with a 99 percentile ranking.

But, after studying other languages in the IE linguistic family, my spelling slipped a bit because of cognate words that are spelled slightly differently. For example, the English word "origin" is spelled "origen" in Spanish.

I taught ESL for a few years.

About 14 years ago, I had a series of TIAs that showed up as pinpricks on an MRI image of my brain. Those pinprick gaps in synaptic connections occasionally affect word memory and use of homonyms. Usually I catch the homonym errors. Also, I usually remember the word I want if I pause and relax. If not, I use a similar word or look up the "missing word" online.

All that takes time so when I'm posting quickly to keep up with a thread or with responses to more than one post, mistakes do slip past me. A few times I have responded to a poster who responded to one of my posts and caught an error that I missed in my first post, then sheepishly corrected it, knowing that many people had already read it.

So, between foreign language cognates, age, TIAs, and autocorrect, mistakes occur in my posts. Since this is a message board and not a publication going to print or a classroom full of learners, I don't worry too much over imperfections in posts any more. I do my best to catch them, and accept that I won't always succeed.

[Hekate]

57. Finding another proofreader is a rarity.💕I worked in a print shop in 1975...

In talking to the woman who hired me I found out that almost no one younger than we were had the capacity to pass the test. To us it was just basic English spelling, grammar, and punctuation as taught all the way through our schooling.

The skill has stood me in good stead. When I made myself take a typing class after my divorce, I found that whatever I lacked in speed was made up for by my ability to know when I’d hit the wrong key and immediately backspace-correct. Same thing when I learned to word-process. When I went back to grad school in midlife, I may have been the only student there who finished my dissertation on my own computer without hiring someone else to word-process and proof it for me.

I hate auto-correct, and have turned it off on every computer and pad I’ve ever owned. What is a glorious tool for my dyslexic ex-husband just introduces errors for me. It has, however, made me more tolerant of other people’s posts here, because I now recognize more errors introduced by cell phones and such, having experienced them myself.

You’re right about skills changing with age — my spelling has slipped a few points, as has word-recall, which is irritating. We shall nevertheless carry on!

[wnylib]

60. For me, the proofreading was natural, too, just based on

what we were taught in school, from grade school through graduation from high school. Back then, schools still practiced sentence diagramming and I think I was the only one who actually enjoyed it.

When I worked for the advertising directory company, we not only proofed for spelling and punctuation, but also for pricing accuracy and for content of the ads to be sure that they met FCC regulations. We had a huge book of regulations on our desks as a reference.

Typing and proofing commercial scripts was just part of the job at the ad agency AV department. It also involved calling and writing to stations, contacting talent for the producer, sometimes hand delivering script changes to a recording studio, fielding calls for the department boss, and being a sounding board for the script writers. Ad agencies are very hectic environments with a lot of distractions and deadlines. Focusing in the midst of chaos was essential.

Both of those jobs were done before PCs, e-mail, cell phones, and fax machines, using typewriters, landlines, and post office mail to communicate changes.

The proofing skills came in handy when writing college papers in another language. Before turning in a paper, it had to be scrutinized for things that did not come naturally to me because of differences from English, like diacritical marks on letters, adjective and noun agreement, noun and pronoun declension, verb conjugation, etc. By then, a computer was available for writing, but usually highlighted possible errors instead of automatically correcting them. Handwritten answers on tests still required checking them myself.

[Oopsie Daisy]

65. It's difficult for me to proof-read my own writing because I know what it's SUPPOSED to say *

* and my eyes will just skip over the errors and missing words that are obvious to anyone else.

[Hekate]

67. Exactly so

[ChazInAz]

78. My first job was in a relative's small print shop.

I was just a kid, but the owners were my Mum's cousins from Wales. Started out as printer's devil, typesetter, proofreader, then linotypist's apprentice....all in high-school. Loved the jobs. It made me a very good speller, and a real lover of my second language. I must confess that, online, I rarely comment on posters' English errors...for fear of being banned for being a Grammar Nazi. My father, when we were learning the language, was quite literally one of those bullies, and I don't want to be "that guy". Alas, I just don't have the patience this saintly teacher displays!
Bless her heart.

[wnylib]

80. My great-grandfather and his grandson, who was my uncle and godfather,

both did typesetting and proofing for our city's newspaper. That was, of course, before computers.

I worked for a few months as a proofreader for the advertising department of a newspaper in a different town. It was a terrible job to have because sales reps and their supervisor would not follow deadlines. They used to pull proofed ads right off of the layout page and have one of the commercial artists type up a new one with changes. Then the reps would slip the changed ad back on the layout page without it being proofed again.

If there were mistakes in the altered ad, I was held responsible. So I asked the sales supervisor to have the reps stick to the deadlines. She said that they brought in the revenue and had to please their customers. So I said that the customers were not pleased if the ad got printed with mistakes, so when they made last minute changes, at least let me see them. She accused me of not owning up to mistakes in proofing.

So, I got my revenge on her. She was always sending memos with instructions or complaints to the artists and me that we were supposed to post on our cubicle walls to follow. The cubicles had 3 walls, leaving them visible to any one who walked by.

Her spelling and punctuation were atrocious, at grade school level. So I proofed and marked one of her long memos in bright red, then posted it on my cubicle wall where everyone could see it, including her.

[ChazInAz]

81. My last job before retiring

Was as a dispatcher for transportation and as concierge for one of Tucson's oldest and largest hospitals in its call center. Complex job, to say the least. ( My theatre-trained voice became my department's trademark!)
Our manager was one of those exemplars of the Peter Principle, and nearly illiterate. As ours was a very large department and always busy, scheduling and holding staff meetings was difficult, but the guy loved to micromanage. He couldn't macromanage to save his soul, but the little annoying details were hugely important to him. He'd devote hours of meeting time to covering requisition forms for pencils and notepads, insisting that we dispatchers (Never seen by the public.) wear uniform scrubs...etc. Eventually, someone higher up the food chain convinced him that emails were the "in thing" for such petty stuff.
His emailed memos became a daily ordeal, thanks to his appalling spelling, grammar and punctuation. I eventually started grading and correcting them, and posting them in my cubicle. At some point, in one of his perambulations around our call center, checking our shoeshines, he noticed one of them. I got called into the office and got a stern lecture, which changed tone when I pointed out that TPTB preferred literate, comprehensible memos. Being a suck-up, he became enchanted with the idea of having his own personal proofreader.

I thus got an unwanted job added on to my already considerable workload. No extra pay, of course.

[wnylib]

83. Oh no. Bad deal for you to get the proofreading extra duty.

Last edited Wed May 22, 2024, 03:21 PM - Edit history (1)

My situation turned out better than that at the newspaper ad department.

In the paper's hierarchy, the artists and I were not supervised by the sales manager. Her memos were just "informative" ones,
supposedly so that we could work in good cooperation with sales. But the memos were actually an authority encroachment.

Way back then, the newspaper was still doing cut and paste pre-printing page layout. The artists and I were answerable to a guy who supervised layout and print deadlines. He was sympathetic to the problems we had with the sales manager, but the owner and manager of the paper catered to sales, which most businesses do because they bring in the operating and profit revenue.

So when my boss saw the proofed memo that I did, he laughed out loud, which drew a couple other people to look at it.

The sales manager complained to the publishing manager, who called together my supervisor, the sales manager, and me to discuss the "unnecessary embarrassment" and "disrespect" that I had shown to the sales manager. In that meeting, I explained what led up to it. My supervisor verified that sales reps made last minute changes after ads were proofed and laid out, leading to errors that were beyond our control and bad for the paper and its relationship to advertising customers.

I added that the sales manager had denied sales responsibility for errors in last minute, unproofed ads and instead accused me of making errors in proofreading. So, I proofed her memo to demonstrate to her that I was capable of catching mistakes, but only IF the material reached my desk. It was ludicrous to scapegoat me for ads that I never got to see.

In the end, with my supervisor's backing, the publishing manager finally recognized that the sales reps were costing money with their last minute, unproofed changes because the paper had to adjust billing when mistakes got printed and customers lost faith in the paper for future ads.

So the artists were instructed NOT to give the printout of last minute changes to ANY sales rep. They could only give them to me. It was a nuisance because it meant that I had to drop whatever I was working on to do a quick last minute proof, especially if I got more than one just 5 minutes before print time. But it did eliminate those errors in print. And it made sales reps more aware of the process at our end. Usually they had the changes soon enough to avoid that kind of crisis but in their busy schedule, waited too long to deliver the changes and thought we could do miracles for them.

I was only doing that job for a few months while waiting for results of resumes and interviews for a teaching position. When I got hired to teach ESL, I was happy to give notice. The sales supervisor made a snide comment to me about leaving and I told her that I looked forward to working with people whose English was better than hers. (My boss overheard that and offered to pay for my lunch.)

[ChazInAz]

84. Love that last comment on ESL and grammar!

I sometimes wonder if I should still refer to English as a "second language", as I had it drilled into me as a child of six. Virtually all of my native Hungarian is gone, now.
But it does explain my good usage and spelling.

[wnylib]

85. The term ESL persists because it's what most people are familiar with.

However, teachers and language departments at universities prefer ELL, English Language Learners, because for some people, English is a 3rd or 4th language. Or, some grow up with two languages from birth, but the non English language has preference in their home. English is sometimes harder for those people.

I once had an adult student in a night class whose first language was Italian. Then he lived in Germany for several years. When learning English, he kept confusing English and German vocabulary and pronunciations because of English cognate words with German. All of his speech had a heavy Italian accent in both German and English.

My great aunt, who came to the US from Germany when she was 7, could fluently speak and read both English and Gdrman. She had a Hungarian friend who knew German because of the former Austrian Empire. So, in summer, the two of them sat on our porch conversing in German with an occasional English word popping up when there was no translation, or at least not one that they knew.

[ChazInAz]

87. I once met an Italian Franciscan monk

The fellow had been doing missionary work in India, where he'd learned English.
His accent was both astonishing and awe-inspiring.

[wnylib]

88. I can imagine.

[LisaM]

69. And voice to text.

I have a friend I text with frequently, she was shocked that I key in my texts, I was shocked that she didn't!

[rubbersole]

12. So there's a real problem when I sarcastically post "woke"...

...oopsie 🫠.

[nuxvomica]

70. You should be using "wide awake" instead

https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/the-wide-awakes.htm

[rubbersole]

71. But I live in Florida.

Trying to fit in...

[soldierant]

16. We have members who are Grammar Police -

in fact I am one, but I try to restrain myself from correcting the grammar and/or spelline of people who have the big picture right.

[dpibel]

22. Hmmm...

"in fact I am one, but I try to restrain myself from correcting the grammar and/or spelline of people who have the big picture right."

I am restraining myself...

[TheBlackAdder]

29. Frum uh linquistiks aproach, if yoo kan undurstand dis message thun et wuz kunveyed sucksesfilly.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

37. I will split the profits with your heirs after I sell beer at your crucifixion.

Meanwhile, I'm just gonna duck and cover.

[Disaffected]

33. ...

[BaronChocula]

32. Your funny!

[JoseBalow]

36. *spelling

I feel your pain

[twodogsbarking]

64. Me too. Substance is more important than form, eh.

[Arne]

3. The moroons realley are genieses

[niyad]

4. This is delightful!!! Thank you for sharing.

I am reminded of a scene in some woody allen movie (forget which one, but before he became a total jerk). He is robbing a bank, and hands the tellers a note, which they proceed to critique. "Does that say gub? I can't make it out", and other comments. As I remember it, he leaves in frustration.

[japple]

13. Was that Take the Money and Run. I love Woody Allen's films. I just don't like the

smarmy, pervy person he became.

[niyad]

39. Yes, that must have been it. Agree with you. Loved his films, but he is a

real piece of work.

[Aristus]

17. A guy going to the guillotine was handed his sentence of death.

He read it, then handed it back and replied: “I see you have made three spelling mistakes.”

What balls…

[niyad]

40. Had not heard that one.

[Aristus]

49. I couldn't remember his name. Had to look it up: Thomas de Mahy.

Marquis de Favras.

[niyad]

50. I will have to check him out.

[soldierant]

18. Life of Brian

had a similar scene but in Latin.

[ms liberty]

26. Classic scene

[niyad]

41. I have never seen that movie. Not a judgment on the movie, just never

got around to it.

[soldierant]

74. i saw it in a theater

witha Catholic priest. I had majored in Latin in college. We were in stitches and everyone was lookig at us

[dutch777]

5. Is she really picking on incels or just younger folks generally? I pity incels and its nothing to do with grammar.

[LiberalFighter]

9. Younger folks are not the only ones.

I'm a senior and until I got on social media did not know the skills of those in my retiree group. Some are not there.

[summer_in_TX]

53. We just watched "The Antisocial Network" on Netflix.

Quite enlightening…and a highly disturbing documentary. I recommend it.

Teen boys entertaining themselves online with memes and crude humor formed online community and bonded over their isolation. But the culture they developed and their collective beliefs warped reality.

These guys thought they were just being funny, it seems. Whew!

[enid602]

6. Houston?

I’ll bet she’s the number one teacher in the entire Houston Schoo’ District.

[LiberalFighter]

8. That would be a fulltime job

[Leith]

10. I appreciate the public service she is doing

My personal pet peeve is inserting apostrophes into plurals. Yes, auto correct is partly to blame, but the human who is writing needs to pay attention more closely.

[Wednesdays]

24. Yeah, a sign on a road near us

advertised "Christmas Tree's" for about ten years. Finally, about two years ago, they painted over the apostrophe. Then the sign disappeared entirely about a year ago.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

38. Gentle correction's: *apostrophe's, plural's, need's. Your wellcome'.

[geardaddy]

76. That is a big pet peeve of mine, too.

That and unnecessary quotation marks.

http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/

[Pinback]

79. Lol!

“Happy” Hour daily.

[Deuxcents]

14. I have auto correct on my iPhone and iPad. I try to proofread what I write

But sometimes I’m amazed at what my smart gadgets come up with

[soldierant]

19. A classic story

is that of the autocorrect which turned "Geronimo" into "geranium - in a newspaper article - which then went toprint that way.

[NJCher]

54. ehhh

Don't take it so seriously. We English teachers love to sit around the teacher's lounge, critiquing the correction skills of these apps. We know more than they do and we could sit there for hours if our schedules would let us, tearing their corrections to pieces.

Microsoft especially: they've gotten better at their corrections and coaching in recent years, though. Back in the day, I used to tell my students to pay no attention to them. Now, however, they are at least worth a glance.

I like this woman's approach. She is ever so friendly as she points out what he needs to do. I wish I was that nice. I never achieved that level of cordiality, but I noticed a few of my colleagues could. This is important. After all, your goal is to make the student a better writer and if they walk away from you feeling miffed or with hurt feelings, it doesn't help.

At one time we were told not use a red pen in correcting student papers. It was because the department head thought it depressed the students to see all that "red stuff."

A recollection: Around the end of the first term, near the Christmas holiday, I had a student ask me in class what I meant by the big letters I had written across something he wrote. He asked if it was a Christmas greeting saying "Ho, ho, ho." I said no, my "n" looks like an "h". He then deduced: "So you're telling me 'No, no, no," not "Ho, ho, ho."

That is my favorite English teacher Christmas story.

[phylny]

61. When I was in graduate school

one of our notorious professors who taught all of the neurology portions of our program, had what we called “the green pen of death”.

[happybird]

55. I swear autocorrect has gotten worse

At some point in the last 18 months, after some iOS update, it started to add apostrophes into plurals. It drives me bonkers, especially when I send or post something without noticing it was inserted. Gah.

[RobinA]

73. Autocorrect On My iPhone

gave me an "it's" the other day for a possessive. That is a major pet peeve of mine and luckily I caught it. The Apple autocorrect has gotten WAY too pushy. I see the oddest changes.

[1WorldHope]

15. I love it. I quit high school the second my friend got a car and we both turned 16.

I eventually did graduate with an associates degree in human services. I later had the wonderful opportunity to work as a sign language interpreter in many, many, English writing classes. As a bystander, I learned more than I ever did in school. So, I admit I was filled with pride when I could correct someone's grammar. But, a friend called me on it in a group text. One of the members on the group grew up with dyslexia and and still has trouble seeing words correctly. That opened my eyes, again.
I think this was a very funny and fair comeback to someone that's being a jerk though. Don't write graffiti that you can't spell!
Please excuse my grammatical errors. 🤗

[PatSeg]

21. Do you know what irritates me?

Nicely designed social media memes with obvious misspellings. The authors could stop long enough to check the spelling.

[ms liberty]

27. Yes! It renders the meme unshareable for me!

[PatSeg]

43. Same here

I make my share of mistakes, so I'm not inclined to correct others, but I'm also not likely share memes with glaring mistakes.

[littlemissmartypants]

20. I suck at grammar. She's brilliant. I don't don't care who she's helping.

I'm here for it.


❤️

[Puppyjive]

23. I thought we were a diverse group

I try to refrain from calling people out because they may lack education. It doesn't make them stupid. I call them out when they promote lies or propaganda. Where do we draw the line anymore? Is propaganda to us the truth to them? Have our moral compasses been hijacked?

[ms liberty]

25. I love her.

[Jeebo]

28. Just curious, but how does she know they're incels?

Last edited Tue May 21, 2024, 02:47 AM - Edit history (1)

I can tell that the person who wrote that is a right-winger, but not necessarily an incel. Or maybe it's the person who made the original post in this thread who made that assumption.

I do like what the English teacher is doing, though.

-- Ron

[AnrothElf]

46. You're fucking kidding, right? He wants to deny women the right to vote. If he's not an incel...

He's something fucking worse.

[Silent3]

56. While we do (around here especially) treat the word "incel" as meaning "right-wing misogynist"...

...who is involuntarily celibate, I'm sure there are plenty of men who are involuntarily celibate who nevertheless don't become misogynists, many men who manage to find female sexual partners even though they are nasty misogynists.

The correlation between "right-wing misogynist" and "incel" is strong, but hardly absolute.

[Jeebo]

59. I wonder if you and I are defining the word differently.

AnrothElf, I think the word "incel" has a much more narrow and specific meaning than just referring to a right-wing man who has discriminatory or misogynistic attitudes toward women. I've always understood the word to mean a heterosexual male who is involuntarily celibate and resents women because he feels they won't have sex with him. The person who wrote the comments in the original post is definitely a right-winger with misogynistic attitudes, but not necessarily an incel. There is a level of nuance here that I hope you understand.

-- Ron

[AnrothElf]

63. LOL "incel" is what they call *themselves*. There's no nuance needed.

It isn't a legal term of art. Or psychological diagnosis. There's no need to parse this.

[Doodley]

34. I love the irony and the trolling of trolls. She needs to do the same exercise for Trump's posts. She'd get more hits.

[AnrothElf]

45. When an incel is murdered on the internet, does an angel have an orgasm?

Just asking questions.

[NoMoreRepugs]

47. Priceless.

[Silent Type]

48. I'd just call them out for being white wing incels. As long as a post makes sense, I'm OK.

Saw a post today that said, “we one again.” Obviously, they meant “won.”

[3catwoman3]

58. There is a pediatric dental office near our house...

…that bears the sign Kid’s Dentist. I have thus far resisted the temptation to go in and ask them how they can make enough money to stay open if they only have one patient.

[phylny]

62. I think she's brilliant. Now, if we could all learn the difference

between affect and effect I do believe we would all get along much better.

[sybylla]

68. I don't correct people's grammar or spelling because it's ableist af.

That said, these jerks deserve it. I am 100% okay with roasting anyone who suggests people are less deserving or less intelligent than them while waving their own lack of learning around.

[forgotmylogin]

72. This is the classic way to take them down.

Link to tweet

(from Xwitter - a chuckling black woman superimposed over a picture of a KKK member holding a sign reading, "WHITE, PROUD AND WITH SUPERIOR JEANS"

And this DU classic:

[geardaddy]

75. Love it!

[Oopsie Daisy]

77. MORE!! Where can I find more of her stuff??

[UTUSN]

82. Which confirms them in their incel-hood.

[myohmy2]

86. +1...

...