I notice misspellings and errant apostrophes, commas, and quotations (any reason there were two set of quotes around "even so" in the slide for "Peace Like a River" Sunday morning?) I don't think any less of the person utilizing the language, I just notice. Sometimes I notice and wonder if they are right, or the way I would do it is right and think to myself to look it up. Sometimes -- like in the first sentence in this paragraph -- I wonder if anything I have written is right. As a general rule, I don't think most of the blatant errors are a lack of intellect or education, but more of a lack of attention or thought. Saying all of this I realize full well all of the other lingual snobs (and you know who you are) will comment to tell me all of the mistakes I have not only in this post, but in the 12 previous.
I saw one recently that I simply can't get out of my head. Mainly because I need the person to explain to me how it makes sense in her head. I wandered onto a message board on the internet recently. A medical student posted that her clothing budget was really helped out because an old roommate gifted her with hammy downs. Yes, that's how she spelled hand-me-downs: hammy downs. No quotes around it to make me think that she knows that it's incorrect, but that's the way her family always writes it. No explanation of why they might be hammy -- do they come wrapped in some type of pork? Four different times she used the phrase "hammy downs." I began to wonder if she had dropped her Sunday lunch and it was hammy down.
This brings to mind one of my favorite quotes:
"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." Robert Wilensky
