[WillowTheWhisp]

I have two opposing points of view here and I shall try to explain them both.

First of all I must admit that like several others it saddens me to see the demise of the English language. The places where I find it most irritating are "official" locations such as shop signs telling me "We supply all you're household needs" or "Ladies Coat's". These are not spelling mistakes but a total lack of understanding of English Grammar. In some cases it is almost understandable when the person having written the sign does not have English as their first language, but you'd think they'd check wouldn't you?

The part of this which worries me most is that the mistakes are being passed on to the next generation often without correction by teachers because it is deemed more important to encourage the children to express themselves than it is to teach them how to do it correctly. I don't just mean the next generation of shopkeepers either. All children see these incorrect signs and assimilate the errors.

I do find that I struggle more to read a post which is grammatically incorrect rather than containing spelling mistakes.

The opposite side of the coin is when it comes to people like my daughter who are dyslexic. She finds it almost impossible to spell some things correctly without help and she doesn't even make the same mistake in the same word the next time she uses it. Pre-typing posts in "Word" does help but it doesn't always solve the problem as the suggested corrections are not always the word she originally intended. I remember a classic "spell-check correction" in a letter I typed once when I worked in a bank. I'd written to a customer accidentally asking her to call in to review her hovercraft. Mimi will often ask me how the simplest of things should be written because her brain simply refuses to tell her.

I make some classic typos myself and they are typos as opposed to spelling mistakes. I know what I mean to put but my fingers just take on a life of their own and produce an entirely different thing - usually "ahve" for "have" and "starnge" for "strange". (I'd be much better at the live aol quizzes if I could only manage to stop doing that.)

So, yes I would like to see correct usage of the language and correct spellings wherever possible but also appreciate tolerance when the meaning of the sentence isn't lost by one or two little errors.