You can request, but campaigning for accurate spelling on the Internet, even in this particularly educated corner of it, is an exercise in futility. For those who care, they will already have corrected themselves after seeing the correct spelling in hundreds and hundreds of posts. For those who do not, a mere request will not change their values.
It depends on the word. For “McGonagall”, a person would probably have low confidence in their being able to spell it from memory, and would check if they cared, so misspelling it is strong evidence of not caring. “Cannon”, on the other hand, is the correct spelling for homophone of “canon”, and so it is less indicative of not caring. “Phase”, another misspelling that appears in this thread, is even more indicative of ignorance rather than apathy. Confusion between “loose” and “lose” is probably interference from words like “choose”, and being reminded of the correct spelling probably will help reinforce the distinction. And going outside of the misspellings in this thread, there are plenty of misspelling, such “straight laced”, “shoe-in”, and “tow the line”, for which a person could quite easily not be exposed to the correct spelling.
You are right the Qiaochu_Yuan’s request is probably hopeless—but I just don’t understand mis-speller’s reasoning on these particular words. Ok, cannon v. canon is understandable, but why go to the effort of writing out all those letters if one is going to get McGonagall wrong? Something like “McG” seems better in every way—more accurate, less effort to type.
But obviously I’m thinking about this wrong in some way, given observed behavior.
Because people don’t know? Because sure they’ve seen it spelled right, but human memory is flawed and if they see it spelled right alongside many misspellings, they may not know which is right and may be too lazy to check?
You can request, but campaigning for accurate spelling on the Internet, even in this particularly educated corner of it, is an exercise in futility. For those who care, they will already have corrected themselves after seeing the correct spelling in hundreds and hundreds of posts. For those who do not, a mere request will not change their values.
It depends on the word. For “McGonagall”, a person would probably have low confidence in their being able to spell it from memory, and would check if they cared, so misspelling it is strong evidence of not caring. “Cannon”, on the other hand, is the correct spelling for homophone of “canon”, and so it is less indicative of not caring. “Phase”, another misspelling that appears in this thread, is even more indicative of ignorance rather than apathy. Confusion between “loose” and “lose” is probably interference from words like “choose”, and being reminded of the correct spelling probably will help reinforce the distinction. And going outside of the misspellings in this thread, there are plenty of misspelling, such “straight laced”, “shoe-in”, and “tow the line”, for which a person could quite easily not be exposed to the correct spelling.
You are right the Qiaochu_Yuan’s request is probably hopeless—but I just don’t understand mis-speller’s reasoning on these particular words. Ok, cannon v. canon is understandable, but why go to the effort of writing out all those letters if one is going to get McGonagall wrong? Something like “McG” seems better in every way—more accurate, less effort to type.
But obviously I’m thinking about this wrong in some way, given observed behavior.
Because people don’t know? Because sure they’ve seen it spelled right, but human memory is flawed and if they see it spelled right alongside many misspellings, they may not know which is right and may be too lazy to check?