I think we all agree that poor literacy can be a heavy curse in life. For example, we live in an
age when (NB it’s never “where”!) this is the norm: when you are looking for a new job, the
person looking at applicants’ CVs will immediately reject your application if they come
across a typo in your CV or covering letter (and don’t expect them to take the time to notify
you about this). And that’s it; your application is a failure, just like that. Meanwhile,
businesses are not unlikely to lose potential customers as a result of said customers coming
across bad (or just poorly or oddly written) language in their marketing. So you can imagine
that being illiterate is a stigma thing – a person labelled as illiterate is commonly regarded as
lazy/sloppy and/or just plain thick and/or untrustworthy, often accompanied by the untested
claim that “they played truant from school too much” (at least, this is certainly how it is in the
world of work). It’s certainly not good news if you’re dyslexic or something.
What are language errors? What is illiteracy? I think we all have a very solid area of what
these things are already, but I’ve included some examples below anyway:
Once, when I was at school, I was playing Hangman on an electronic device I owned at the
time and this boy called Howard was watching me play. At the end of one game (I can’t
remember if I won it or not), the word was revealed to be “radish”. At some point I just said
this word (either when it was displayed on the screen or just before – I can’t remember
which), after which Howard told me that this word was spelled with two Ds (which I knew
even back then was wrong), and that if it had a single D it would be pronounced “ray-dish”.
“I thought you were clever, George!” I remember him saying. But I didn’t brand him as
“illiterate”; I just knew that he was deluded but that I was never going to convince him as
such. Thinking back, I probably should have asked him if he had ever actually seen this word
(or should that be any word?) spelled with two Ds – I don’t think asking him if he knew what
a radish was would have helped. As it is, I really did sympathise with him, not least because
any number of words with “-ish” on the end are adjectives with the “-ish” suffix implying
that something is “kind of” whatever the adjective is. “Biggish” is not the same as “big.” But
there is no such word as “rade” (pronounced “raid”; and an adjective specifically, in this
case) – then again, there is no adjective “radd” [maybe followed by one or two more letters]
either.
Then there was the client I had who told me how “greatful” she was for my work – I’ve
written about this before in another article. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was spelled
“grateful” but I imagined she was misled into spelling it like that because “great” so often
means “good/positive”; meanwhile, gratitude is definitely a good thing.
How about this one? A computer game in which, if you start a new game and start playing in
one particular area (for the first time) with one of the characters you control, that character
will remark “I’ve lost track who’s side they’re on.” Yes, “who’s” is a word, but it should be
“whose” here. “Who’s” with an apostrophe meaning “belonging to who”, so to speak – no,
English doesn’t work like that! It’s only short for “who is”, and unlike “whose”, “who is” is
never a pronoun!
This is a new one – and the one that actually motivated me to write this article in the first
place. Don’t lots of us pronounce the word “missionary” like it had no A in it? And isn’t it
widely agreed that that’s the correct way to say it as a result? Well, I looked up “Missionary
definition” on Google, and when I clicked on the audio icon next to the word it pronounced it
with an A, which surprised me somewhat. But if many people pronounce the word without
the A (in a separate syllable), could it lead to the A being lost in the written word –
“missionry”? Does that word qualify as “unforgivable” illiteracy or not? I can’t quite tell or
decide.
But let’s not limit it to examples purely from my own personal experience. Lots of us are
familiar with pairs of words that sound the same, like “accept” vs. “except”, and, more to the
point, that people don’t always use the write one when they right (that was a joke). And one
very common spelling mistake in English is people who write “it’s” with an apostrophe
believing that that’s what you put to signify “belonging to it”. It isn’t. It’s always “its”. To
clarify, “it’s” is always short for “it is”. But personally, that doesn’t truly make me cringe,
like “I should/could/would of”, or when someone shows that they don’t know the difference
between “to”, “two” and “too”, or “there”, “their” and they’re”. And don’t even get me
started on people who write “your stupid” meaning short for “you are stupid”.
In light of the stigma I talked about in the first paragraph, I think it would be nice if we could
draw some sort of line between what should be labelled as true “unforgivable” illiteracy and
the kind of incorrect English that only gets written as a result of a perfectly understandable
momentary oversight or presumption. I must admit that even I, with my fine spelling and
high standard of English (just consider the kind of linguistic skill that is really required to
make a successful career in professional translation) got it wrong recently; read this tweet I
put up: https://twitter.com/TrailTranslator/status/1633130376364261378?s=20 (And, for
better or worse, I personally just “normally” pronounce “missionary” without the A like – as
far as I’m concerned – a lot of people.)