You have to go a layer above that and ponder if the person consciously analyzed whatever combination of letters+punctuation he/she wrote had a weighting for others to assign a "value."

For example, you used the word "impacted". Some stylists are annoyed that the noun "impact" has been verb-ified into "impacted" when there was already a perfectly good word like "affected". However, others don't mind it and it is already widely used in serious business writing and academic research papers. (Many PowerPoint slides have the word "impacted".) The point is you don't sit down and weigh how others judge you for using "impacted". It just came out naturally from your brain, to your hands typing it, and that's what we see. You didn't intend for that word to act as a speed bump for others to judge you. Thankfully, most of us don't care about it.

Also btw, you have "comma splices" in your post.[1] Again, I think it's better that most HN readers are forgiving of grammatical mistakes because I don't think most of us would want to see endless meta tangent posts pointing out and correcting everyone's errors.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law

I do now! :)

Does this mean introverts prefer the consistency of opinionated frameworks and languages? Is Go preferred by introverts, Scala by extraverts?

The Wikipedia entry mentions "The Elements of Style" by White and Strunk as one of the sources of the rule. The manual has been criticised by professional linguists, who noted that White and Strunk didn't even seem to understand what constitutes a passive voice (while discouraging their use). The manual also contains other silly prescriptions, like avoiding split infinitives.

[1] Sadly, many are voiced prescriptively despite the fact that neither S&W nor any other manual of style can claim to be the final arbiter of our ever-evolving language.

Very funny. Was this intentional?

I don't see what the usual "grammar pedant" complaints have to do with valuing communication. I typically see people complain about things like using "there" instead of "their", "its" instead of "it's", "affect" instead of "effect". As a rule, none of these things have any impact on the ability of a reader to understand the writer's intended message. I realize that in some rare cases these mistakes create ambiguity, but that's never the grammar pedant's complaint.

I disagree, I've encountered several instances in corporate communications where the use of then instead of than has completely changed the meaning of a message.

Imagine writing a compiler that spent much of its parsing time trying to infer what the programmer meant, instead of enforcing a syntax and getting-on with the task of translating to machine code. It would be an enormous behemoth that would take much longer to do its job than necessary.

Yet, strangely, those programmers who don't care much about grammar seem quite happy to adhere to arbitrary programming language syntax. Why is that? Why don't they force compilers to just accept their possibly-incorrect inputs with the excuse 'you knew what I meant'?

On the other hand, I'm Italian. I came to understand, after a few years living in an English speaking country, that the emphasis Italians put on writing correctly (as well as on many other things - e.g. eating well, dressing decently, avoiding public drunkenness) has no correspondence in the English speaking world.

Did I annoy you enough? :)

As I'm sure you know, English spelling is also much less phonetically obvious than Italian (and I would not be surprised to learn that English is slightly grammatically more complicated than Italian, although frankly, as far as I'm concerned, any language with grammatical gender wins for difficulty), so emphasizing correct writing might be slightly harder.

You second point is absolutely correct: English spelling is a nightmare especially if you don't have any alternative phonetic system in which to represent it. My Italian wiring makes "there" and "their" two completely different words (they would be pronounced differently if read phonetically in Italian: "ther-a" and "the-eer") - English speakers don't have the luxury of a discriminating phonetical representation. By the way, this whole thread is about "grammar pedants" - but in fact we're just talking about spelling. The construction of the sentences is very rarely wrong.

The type of person that sprinkles their text with whatever word seems appropriate enough and leaves you to figure out what they truly mean is offloading their cognitive work onto you, to the detriment of communication and understanding.

For writing where more time is spent reading it than typing it, it indicates inconsiderateness not to apply the necessary amount of spelling and grammar checking if the writer is unable to produce well-formed writing without specifically attending to its well-formedness. (Although it could also be a status signal to be able to make errors.)

(It's the same reason for code formatting and style rules - they standardize the low level details so readers can focus on the higher-level meaning.)

Any native English speaker who reads much at all (not to mention writes!) and has above a certain level of innate linguistic intelligence will also automatically develop perfect grammar and perfect or near-perfect spelling, so making frequent errors also indicates a certain semi-literacy.

It depends. Now that you have gone from an intelligence problem to a value problem: do you believe these people are worth less because you believe yourself we choose our values and inherit our intelligence ? Do you despise them even more so now that it's a value question and not an intelligence one ?

Or are they not intelligent enough to pick up the adequate values ?

It also depends on how you pick up on the less grammatically versed or bully them into shame when pointing out their mistakes. Do you do that ?

More importantly: s our grasp of grammar strong enough to make up for the perceived deficiencies of the other interlocutors ?

No, but I would probably be less inclined to want them as a housemate (RE: the article). The premise is that the e-mail is all you have to go on, so while it's definitely reading into the details it'd almost certainly be a consideration.

For example, if someone places a low value on communication then it would likely be more difficult to come to reasonable mutual understandings about household protocols (chores/cleaning, respectful practices, etc).

> Do you despise them even more so now that it's a value question and not an intelligence one ?

I wouldn't say I despise (or even dislike) them at all, we'd simply be unlikely best friends.

> Or are they not intelligent enough to pick up the adequate values ?

No

> It also depends on how you pick up on the less grammatically versed or bully them into shame when pointing out their mistakes. Do you do that ?

No

> More importantly: s our grasp of grammar strong enough to make up for the perceived deficiencies of the other interlocutors ?

Even if it is, it can be a terrible experience where one side is doing an incredible amount of work compared to the other. Incorrect homophones can be very difficult and when you combine them with spelling errors and other errata, it's often as bad as a garden path sentence because the message can be legitimate but have changed meaning. Just omit commas for some fun: "Rachael Ray finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog"

I'd say that you're not the only one thinking this way, but some would disagree because that makes you an "uncle tom".