Last night I was absent-mindedly scrolling through my Facebook feed when I came upon a political thread discussing the recent Ontario election. The principal antagonists in the chat were a brother and sister on opposite sides of the political divide. The details of the conversation aren't important here, but one thing that was nagging me as I eavesdropped on their Thanksgiving-dinner-table chatter was the atrocious grammar of the Ford-supporting (as in Ontario's newly-minted Trump clone premier, Doug Ford) brother.
Although it's unlikely that I would have been sympathetic to the brother's position in any case, I couldn't help thinking that his constant and consistent errors were undoing his argument all on their own. I wanted to warm up my fingers and point this out to him on the thread, but since this was a family affair and I haven't actually seen the brother since he was a teenager more than two decades ago, I thought better of it. (Thankfully I didn't have a glass of wine in my hand at the time.)
It's 2018, and by now we've all seen pointless political arguments devolve into even more pointless mud-slinging over spelling and grammar. We know it solves nothing. So, rather than getting in the middle of a family feud, I'm instead going to shout into the wind that while spelling mistakes are human, recurring grammatical errors tell far more about the writer than they realize.
I'm speaking specifically of the incorrect use of homophones - your and you're; they're, there, and their; its and it's; and the dreaded 'should have' and 'should of', the latter of which isn't even a phrase in the first place. Unlike spelling mistakes, these are errors that should never be made by a native writer of English. This is because they are not mistakes. They are misunderstandings of the language itself.
Many people who confuse homophones in this manner will be successful people with high salaries. Some may have a great deal of specialized knowledge. For this reason, it is wrong and unhelpful to call them stupid. Indeed, they may have these exact facts in store to throw back at you when you question their intelligence. But while it is possible that these error-prone amateur pundits may not be the dummies that their writing skills suggest, they nonetheless almost certainly do not possess the breadth of knowledge one should to have a meaningful debate on society or politics.
Let's take a step back and consider the mistakes in question. As mentioned above, confusing your and you're is not a spelling mistake. The apostrophe and extra letter are far too specific for this to be a slip of the finger (as confusing to and too may in some cases be). The writer is making an active syntax error, substituting a possessive pronoun for a noun/verb combination or vice versa.
Now let's take a further step back and talk about language acquisition - specifically native language acquisition. We don't learn our native language by studying grammar and memorizing lists of words. We learn our native language through repeated exposure to it from birth. Our brains identify patterns and we experiment with the language. Teachers and parents correct the mistakes without necessarily explaining them. We filter errors out through trial and, um, error. The key is constant exposure.
When musing with friends or lecturing family members these mis-typing social scientists make no discernible verbal errors because they are native speakers of English. They have been exposed to spoken English their whole lives. But when typing the language - a realm where homonyms must be distinguished through spelling - the errors are everywhere and they are consistent. This is because they are not native readers and writers of the language. They lack the requisite exposure to the written word to filter out their errors. They think they are writing correctly because that is how they have always written. They haven't encountered enough examples of other people's writing to recognize that the way they write is not the way the world at large does.
To put it simply, they don't read much.
It is through reading that we gain exposure to a wide variety of ideas. It is how we encounter the opinions and ideas of people that are different from us. It is how we learn about things that we have not directly experienced ourselves.
People who don't read, or those who read very little have a paucity of knowledge of the world outside of themselves - the world inhabited by the massively diverse group of people that make up our society - our polity. Their understanding of the world is so limited, that their politics can't help but be facile. In short, they're not qualified to talk about politics.
And you can determine that simply by looking at they're grammar.
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