Whenever you confuse the two, you cause me to have to reparse the sentence. "it's" becomes "it is" and then I have to determine that that doesn't make any sense and go back to substitute it. Vice versa. I also have a linguistics background. So I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.
> Whenever you confuse the two, you cause me to have to reparse the sentence. "it's" becomes "it is" and then I have to determine that that doesn't make any sense and go back to substitute it.
I'm sorry. When they come up with a cure for dyslexia, I'll be sure to get it. In the meantime, I suspect that most people are just dyslexic enough (dyslexia is a spectrum) that these little things cause them a great deal of trouble. It's not that they don't care; it's that if they did care, it would drive them crazy. Me, I do care about details. That's no doubt, in part, why I became a programmer.
As to throwing you off, since this mistake is so common, it would seem to be easy enough to train yourself to treat the two words as hominyms of each other. After all, you have no problem, I take it, with all the other homonyms in the language. (Yeah, I know, wheelchair ramps are annoying!) The fact that the words are pronounced identically proves conclusively that we don't need the words to be distinguished, other than by context.
As to having linguistics backgrounds, in my classes they beat prescriptivism out of me. How did yours survive?
I guess I kept mine in tact by studying other languages and having to deal with people internationally. And my fondness for "The Elements of Style" and "On Writing" fostered it natively.
I should think that dealing with people internationally would provide more tolerance for questionable grammar, not less, since non-native speakers of English typically make quite a few grammatical errors. Especially for irregular and idiomatic aspects of grammar.
Take those ignorant Brits, for example. They are always saying "different to" rather than "different from". That's much more annoying than using "it's" for "its", as it's not even pronounced the same way. And don't get my started on them misspelling "color" and "rumor".
I've mentioned this elsewhere in the comments, but you're extremely unlikely to ever see a non-native speaker write "greater then" rather than "greater than." It's a pseudo-homophone (they really are pronounced differently) that just doesn't exist to anyone picking up English as another language. More than that, it's confusing as hell for them to read because it's a form that makes no sense. "would of" and "would've" is another that comes to mind. Mixing "lose" and "loose" up seems fairly common nowadays, too.
You're right in that those not fluent in English make mistakes that seem odd, but I don't think I've ever come across a case where the error wasn't with a different tense or form of the verb. I.e., the sentence is structured a bit oddly, but it largely makes sense. The same cannot be said of "would of."
> I don't think I've ever come across a case where the error wasn't with a different tense or form of the verb. I.e., the sentence is structured a bit oddly, but it largely makes sense.
Oh come now. English, and I presume all natural languages, are replete with idiom for which it is virtually impossible for a non-native speaker to ever master. (E.g., "different from" is the correct idiom, while "different than" is not. But non-native speakers often mess up idioms that I didn't even realize were idiomatic until I hear a foreign speaker get them wrong. Things like "Put that at the table" rather than "on the table", etc.) If you learn a language after puberty, you will almost certainly never learn a language with the fluency of a native speaker. Something in our brains restructures itself after that point.
And this is why your claim is so insidious. If someone grows up in a poor community which speaks a different dialect of English from "Standard Written English", and they don't become fluent in Standard Written English before the age of puberty, they are likely screwed for life. They are biologically determined to NEVER master it to the degree that you require. But since you have a background in Linguistics, you must already know this.
This whole topic makes me rather depressed. It seems to me that anyone who promotes the idea that anything like perfect grammar is required to be a programmer--or anything other than an editor of some sort--is lacking in both compassion and ability to think scientifically. If you are willing to discriminate in hiring based on hypotheses for which there is ZERO scientific evidence, then you fail on both counts.
In fact, if I were to hire programmers, I think that instead I might test them on their abilities to be empathic and to think scientifically and logically, since these are skills that actually do matter for software engineers. Prescriptive grammarians would fail on all three counts.
By the way, do you have any idea how hard it was to get into and graduate from MIT being dyslexic? And yet now the world wants to add all these crazy hiring criteria hoops that I'm supposed to jump through??? Coding on whiteboards? Having perfect grammar? Doing handsprings and cartwheels? Haven't I proven myself enough already by getting into and graduating from one of the best and most difficult universities in the world, and then continuing on in a career with many commendable accomplishments? E.g., writing the software that configures an X-ray space telescope, and implementing the specificity scoring algorithm for RNA Interference hairpins; knowing how to program in a dozen-plus programming languages; etc. The increasing tendency towards myopic monoculture and inflexible hiring practices infuriates me. I consider it a personal attack on my mental and financial well-being. And it is!
Regarding your claim that "would of" makes no sense, I'm not sure how to jibe this with your claim of having a linguistics background. The first thing that one learns in Linguistics, which is the scientific study of how people actually do speak, as opposed to the unscientific field of prescriptive grammar, which aims to tell people how they ought to speak, is that if a community of people speak or write a certain way, then it always makes sense, and there is always a good cognitive reason for it.
That's not to say that the good cognitive reason always maximizes functionality, but the same criticism can certainly be made about prescriptive grammar too. A lot of the rules in prescriptive grammar are completely arbitrary, and don't reflect the real language, as actually spoken.
A clear example of this is the deprecation of double negatives. This prohibition is a modern invention, invented by Bishop Robert Lowth in 1762. Before that everyone in English said, "I don't have none", just as they do in Romance languages. There was nothing wrong with the sentence, "I don't have none" before 1762, and there is nothing wrong with it today, except to the extent with which you wish to distinguish yourself as part of the upper class. This cynical reason is the very reason that most of Lowth's silly invented rules were adopted by the upper class. There was nothing better about the way Lowth wanted people to speak compared to the way they had spoke before, other than as tool of class distinction.
Another example is the word "ain't". The sentence, "Ain't I a genius?" is actually grammatically correct. Contrast this with how most people now will say, "Aren't I a genius?" which is just plain wrong. Why do people make this mistake? Because prescriptive grammarians beat "ain't" out of them, which caused people to start using something wrong. Sure, now the "correct" thing to say is "Am I not a genius?" But what kind of pretentious idiot would say that?
As to what sense there is to be made of "would of" and "it's" vs "its": This clearly expresses a natural human tendency to desire a more phonetic written language. Spelling in English is just plain dumb. Don't take my word for it--just ask the great author George Bernard Shaw.
I have friends from Italy, and they tell me that there are no such things as spelling bees in Italy. I.e., if you know how to pronounce a word, you know how to spell it. What an enlightened language! Perhaps without having to devote so much of their brains to keeping track of the spellings of tens of thousands of words, they can use it for more productive endeavors. I guess I have no scientific evidence for this, but I do hear that Italians are better lovers. That's gotta count for something!
tldr: A pox on the anti-scientific prescriptivists and obstacle-course-of-arbitrariness-makers of the world.
Perhaps standard grammar is not, as you argue, the best measure of semantic correctness. Then please, let us violate standard grammar wherever it improves accuracy.
Writing something different from what you mean because the two sound alike does not qualify.
I'm fond of Bertrand Russell myself. Does your argument stand on its own?
If we were to replaced both "it's" and "its" with just "its", absolutely no expressiveness in the language would be lost. This is shown by the fact that in spoken English, there is no audible distinction between these words. You can tell which word is being used 100% of the time that they are used in a sentence by the context alone. No sane person ever argues that we should introduce an audible distinction between "it's" and "its" in order to make a more expressive spoken language.
I don't know what Bertrand Russell would say, but I know what the great writer George Bernard Shaw would say. He lobbied very hard for a transition to a completely phonetic alphabet. I think he sometimes even wrote using it.
That's completely hypothetical. I could say "cat" and "dog" should in the future both be called "dog." That doesn't really excuse calling cats dogs.
Perhaps a new standard of spelling could be created and, as you suggest, "it's" and "its" could be replaced by "its." But that's not what you're doing when you write "it's" instead of "its;" instead, you are writing a word that is different from the one you mean.
"Its" has a meaning now, today, that whoever parses you language will use. Perhaps you will convince everyone to overload that meaning with a new one, but in the meantime write what you mean.
In the meantime, I'm dyslexic, and you don't seem to be very considerate of that.
Additionally, what I said is not hypothetical. It's a linguistic fact. Your comparison of phonetic spelling to replacing "cat" and "dog" with one word is a linguistic falsehood.
Perhaps someday falsehoods will be as accepted as facts, but in the meantime, speak the truth.
Writing "pier" instead of "peer" is, just like writing "cat" instead of "dog," wiring something different from what you mean. Your reason for confusing "pier" and "peer" doesn't make them the same. Perhaps it's hard to get the right answer, but that doesn't make a wrong answer right.
As for your dyslexia, I don't think it's relevant. Your case for phonetic spelling wasn't specific to dyslexics.
If "pier" and "peer" were merged into one word, then there would be sentences that are ambiguous. No such ambiguities arise with "its" vs "it's". They aren't even the same parts of speech.
You also have an incorrect notion of right and wrong. Read up on some linguistics and get back to me. E.g., there is nothing more "right" about "Standard Written English" than there is about the dialects spoken in inner cities. Both are equally good, full rich languages. Though certainly mistakes can be made within a dialect, you must understand, in order to be a civilized human, that for many native English speakers, their native language is not Standard Written English, but rather a regional dialect. Consequently, when they are in a situation where they are expected to communicate in Standard Written English, they are being expected to communicate in a language that is not their native language, and yet many people will not afford them the allowances that we make for people whom no dialect of English is their native language.
As for my dyslexia, it certainly is relevant, as this entire thread, from when I started posting on it, which is a direct ancestor of this post, and yours, is about whether it is moral to deny people jobs just because they make such an unimportant mistake. It's a mistake that never actually matters, except to the pedantic, and it's a mistake that dyslexics are particularly prone to. Not because they don't understand the difference, but rather because they often can't see when such mistakes are made.
