[quote=Lilly;492346]
Quote:
Originally Posted by BERNADETTE
Spelling and grammar certainly do matter. They matter a hell of a lot. It's my pet subject and I could go on about it forever, in fact I can get quite boring on the subject.  Wherever I go I pick up errors in shops, cafes, etc. and never fail to point them out to the poor soul who has come shopping with me. 
I have been told several times to lighten up about it but I won't and it infuriates me that there is such apathy these days towards spelling and grammar. As you say, once we start to accept these shoddy efforts then standards slip and what hope for the next generation? Soon we'll have nobody left who can write properly in English. 
My point earlier was that as there are usually some errors in most posts we could be here all day picking them up and then the threads get interrupted. I definitely think that if someone is to be a lawyer then they should have a good command of the English language and hope that the exams they have to take ensure that they are but if we start pulling their Accyweb posts to pieces for spelling/grammatical errors it detracts from the topic in hand.
Where would we stop? 
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English has been in a state of flux ever since it was cobbled together, and English is no longer the exclusive property of the English. The next generation has far more to worry about than syntactical redundancy and dangling participles.
I do think that one can be too picky. I would never point out, for example, that "someone" is singular and that all pronouns refurrring to it should also be singular ... "they" seems to be a little on the plooral side to me.