This is quite recent but I’ve been browsing Lemmy a bunch lately and quite often I see extreme grammatical errors.
I’m not talking about like, incorrect stylistic choices between commas and dashes, or an improper use of ellipses or missing commas or incorrect use of apostrophes in its/it’s or in multiple posessive articles or just plain typos or any nitpicky grammar nazi shit like that, but just basic spelling specifically.
It’s one thing when you can’t spell some pretty uncommon words and you’re too lazy to look it up and/or use autocorrect, but it’s a completely different league to misspell very basic words, very recently I saw someone spell “extreme” as “extream” which is just kind of baffling, I actually can’t even imagine how one would make such a mistake?
And it’s not been an isolated thing either, I’ve seen several instances like that lately.
Am I going crazy? Is it just me?
My guess is it’s just the frequency illusion, because they’re also super common among Americans who have only ever spoken English from birth. My theory is that these types of misspellings (like ‘itsplain’ instead of ‘explain’) are from folks who don’t read a lot and therefore seem to be guessing on spelling based on what they’ve (mis)heard rather than having seen it on the page/screen enough to notice the correct spelling.