the impartince of good speling

On one of the mailing lists I'm on, the following "conversation" took place yesterday:

... sent out a memo about using there name as a generic name for air ambulance. At our place the reporters were told to use "Air Ambilance"

then someone asked what an "Ambilance" was.

A third person chimed in with "So now we're complaining about spelling error's??"

Oy, vey.

Part of the reason the rest of the world (rightly so) sees Texas as a hillbilly backwater is because the vast majority of natives here can't spell (or grammar) their way out of a wet paper bag. In the first two sentences above, there are two errors. In the last sentence, there is one. I didn't see the use in correcting "error's" but couldn't help but feel sorry for the writer.

When I read something (whether online or in print) it's distracting to deal with the near-constant grammar errors, misspelling and misuse of punctuation. I don't understand how students can get a diploma when they can't complete even one sentence without an error that those of us with half a brain will trip over as we try to understand what they're saying.

Then, as seen in the second sentence above, someone else has the audacity to defend these errors under the guise that "smart people can figure out what he's trying to say". It's enough to make me want to take away "they're diploma" [sic] until they can converse like rational adults.

Perhaps they were home schooled, and their parents were incapable of correcting the errors, or didn't want Little Joe Bob to have poor self esteem, so they gave them a passing score although it was undeserved.

All of us make occasional typos, but with the ubiquity of spell checkers and grammar checkers, there's no excuse for such clumsiness; it simply breeds more and more bad behavior, until communication devolves into what passes for Acceptable via Text Messaging.