Monthly Archives: January 2011

One status update

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“since I have no job/bf etc’…I had 2 babies, handled a grt carrier,took care of my house and did my social responsibility bit….I thnk gul needed a haircut newaysss..lol”

I can’t get past bad spellings. There .. it is out there.. my one own issue where I cannot hold forth the judgement. Of course I make mistakes and have been known to send mail after mail apologising for typos.

It’s a revelation to me how people can go through life without even knowing the right word for things. Career is perhaps what you are so proud, not the carrier… I keep telling myself that no judgement is needed here. Some people are not good with spellings and it isn’t a requirement for communication, anymore.

Long ago when spams bots weren’t this active and we actually read the forwards we got, I remember the one about a study from some university (read some boring person who had nothing better to do) showed us how we could read the following paragraph without a hitch in understanding i.

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a tatol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.

But the sub-editor in me recoils at the thought of continuing to pass on such horrendous spelling mistakes to our children who anyway are reading fewer books and want every message as a status update.

When I was in college many decades ago my mother was teaching me Marathi for my college elective language. She would groan at the level of bad grammar in the textbooks. She was especially appalled at the spellling and the rasva and deergha matras (I have no idea how to translate this). She was then told by a college teacher that the spellings were deliberately ignored as it was to encourage people from not dropping out.

Maybe English is also coming to that?

Happy new year..

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What is about the year end that makes us want to sum up our lives? In achievements.. in benchmarks.. in things lost and gained and things done differently. In bank balances and in heartbreaks.

Why don’t we just say goodbye and turn our backs on the year that has gone and welcome the new one with open arms? Promise to ourselves to change at least one things about ourselves in this new year to avoiding falling into the same pits that you have been falling for the last few years?