Advance apologies - a spelling one!

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Okay, I'm being one of those posters, and am thereby effectively basting myself and willingly stepping onto the grill for a flaming.

But: when did this "ect" business start?! Every third post I read these days is "ect" this and "ect" that. It's "etc", people! E-T-C! For "et cetera"! I'm developing a nervous twitch every time I see it, and am actually going to pop before too long.

I'm done. Unleash the pedant-strength flame throwers.

Not that it matters, but the written English language isn't all that consistent.

Plenty of words exist in two acceptable spellings.

To judge people for errors of this type is petty and small-minded.

Is it typo' or typo?

Depending on definition it is "short for typograhical error" or a term "standing for typographical error"

Oh, and I'm going to be boring and wheel this out again, seeing as what I wrote it for such occasions. readingmedievalbooks.wordpress.com/2014/09/25/i-should-of-known-julian-of-norwich-and-the-venerable-history-of-dodgy-auxiliary-verbs/

I would think that people write 'typo' without any apostrophe or full stop for the same reason we no longer write Mrs. Smith, as people once did. Or Halloween with apostrophes in.

Sure, we know they are abbreviations, but they have become naturalised. By contrast, we still write 'Montbaston, ed., Why The Fuck Does Anyone Care (Pedantston: Mumsnet, 2014). Because 'ed' is still treated as needing the punctuation to show it's an abbreviation.

Written inconsistency. We live with it.

I never said it was acceptable to use it because of the accent, I explained that in typing a common mental process results in typing a homophone. It doesn't mean the different spelling is correct, but of course correctness in spelling is a dubious thing anyway, and until mass transit and printing presses was pretty much purely phonetic. It's just we've both regularised onto a few spellings of common words and removed the link to pronunciation.

The people with jobs correcting grammar & spelling: what are these jobs and how does one come by them?

It's only part of my job. I teach English Lit to university students, and I came by it by studying English Lit, with a very small amount of teacher training. Why?

mmmm I still write Mrs. and Dr. etc.

I second that question, tak1ing: I'd like to know, because I'd like to do it.

The one that winds me right up is when some bloody genius, in a book, which has been peer reviewed and sent through the hands of an editor at a university press, informs me that a column of figures in a table adds up to 100. And I look, and swiftly realise, without even actually totting it all up, that it doesn't: you can't add 36, 39, 25, 15, and 10, and reach a total of a hundred.

Aside from that, I am irrationally annoyed by posts that begin with 'So...', as in, 'So, my MIL came round...' or 'So, I was on the bus and...'.

Yes, now I think of it, my mum does too, somewhere. She also still puts a double space after a full stop - which is something people did to stop typewriters jamming, as I understand it - because it's just become a habit.

I reckon these things show how much written conventions do change, quite slowly, but they do.

mehs - oh, no! That's a totally different order of error - that's inexcusable. IMHO.

Grammatical mistakes drive me nuts because they affect the meaning of what I'm reading. I have to slow down and translate, which is really annoying. Spelling mistakes bother me less because some of them are tricky.

JeanneDeMontbaston Don't think so, think it was just what typesetters originally did when setting type, the single spacing came later when saving paper was the main aim! The typewriter double space was just to mimic that spacing with all they had.

Style guides now mostly prefer single space of course, but 19th century style guides would've preferred increased spacing following punctuation.

Ah, I see! I may have got mixed up with keyboard layouts and typewriters. Thanks.

Jeanne, I'll name names: Cornell University Press.

Had a look at your blog, btw. Fascinating. And you explain what you do in normal English, not that horrible strangulated 'English' so loved by so many academics ('problematise.... the technology of.... reductive...') which makes me want to scream.

Mmm.

Those are technical terms. How would you translate 'problematise' into standard English?

But yes, the numbers issue is awful. That's just shoddy.

I know what you mean, and there isn't a single word to translate 'problematise', but there is for 'reductive': over-simplified. I read a lot, and sometimes (not always) I feel that the author is using the technical words when they don't really need to: this has the function of excluding people who don't speak the jargon, even though, in that particular piece of writing, the jargon isn't necessary. Necessary jargon, of any trade (including academia) I have no issue with at all.

Anyway, this is rather off-topic... Sorry, OP!

Yes, true. It's a balance, isn't it?

Some people just enjoy being very wanky when they've learned new word.

It is sort of relevant, isn't it? You can be absolutely 'correct' in your language use and still write something very clunky and unhelpful to people reading.

Some people just enjoy being very wanky when they've learned new word.

Writing lucid prose is a real gift and yes, lucidity is a great help to the poor struggling reader.

Dislike pedantry-my Mum is a pedant.
"Should of" and ect. do irritate me though.

Ect annoys me but I as it's an abbreviation it could be considered correct - maybe?? They are just using the second t instead of the first.

Some one up thread mentioned 'hear, hear'. It is only recently I realised it is not 'here, here'. To me 'here, here' makes more sense:

'hear, hear' = "I hear you" (but don't necessarily agree).

'Here, here' = "same here, I agree"

Or 'hear, hear' = everyone, hear this, it's worth listening to.
That's always been my interpretation.

how about "hear here" listen to this over here....

Tak1ng - I am a freelance editor and proofreader.

Mehsmum - probably because academic publishers pay very low rates for editing and proofreading so few editors want to work for them except new or inexperienced ones... Mind you, checking that a column of figs adds up is a basic error.