It's not an error that makes me froth with vitriol the way some others do as discrete isn't a very commonly used word in non-academic contexts, but it really does stick out in something that looks otherwise rather professional.

It's one of my pet peeves. Possibly because Mat does it so often LOL.

I'm bothered by this. I don't want to say the wrong thing, here, but although I'm not dyslexic, ill-educated or a person of low IQ and usually have near-perfect SPAG, there are a lot of people for whom that's simply not an option.

I think it's fine to insist that SPAG standards are met in advertising and educational campaigns, but my point is more of a general one - pedantry pisses me off. It pisses me off because there's ignorance, which most people can help, there's intolerance, which everyone can help, and then there are learning disabilities and low IQ - which a small but significant amount of people can do bugger all about.

For the same reason, liberals laughing at George Bush because of his phraseology pissed me off. Mainly because there are far better and more relevant things to question and criticise the man over than his ability to misunderestimate noun placement - that's probably the one thing he *couldn't* help.

But if you have bad spelling, and you know you have bad spelling, and you want to publish something in a national newspaper, what is wrong with getting someone to check you've not made a mistake?

In a written medium words are the code by which we communicate. Everyone HAS to stick to the same rules, or we don't understand each other. If you can't stick to the rules, then get someone who can to help. That's not oppressive, that's HELPING PEOPLE TO COMMUNICATE. Saying "oh, well, complaining about SPAG is just pedantry and some people can't help it" says to me that you'd rather people who have genuine literacy problems failed to communicate effectively than help them to communicate effectively. I don't think it's me, as the pedant, who is doing the harm there.

What SB said. There's a difference between informal communication such as IMs and blog comments, where I at least am fairly forgiving of reasonable errors, and things like that, or the recent time I was helping out a campaign and had to try to get people to sign a petition saying "Save Our School's".

Everyone makes mistakes (the most intelligent person I know, an author of several books, is mildly dyslexic and still not 100% sure of the difference between principle and principal, among other things) but if you want to communicate effectively with the public, it's the kind of thing it doesn't take long to get someone to check over.

(As for Bush, I read somewhere that Bush only ever made those kind of mistakes in sentences using words such as 'compassion' and 'sharing' and never in sentences about destroying the evil-doers. If this is the case (and most Bushisms I've seen do fall into that category) that's often a symptom of sociopathic personality disorder, which *is* worth knowing about...)

I'd love to be more annoyed but given how often my yuppie 'flu brainfog beats the crap out of my inner grammar nazi, I'd feel like a terrible hypocrite :(

I don't care; it's not my campaign, after all. I do, however, think that it makes the copywriter look stupid and the proof-reader look careless.

Excellent icon! I just had to watch it all the way thru through...

Yes.

That one's a particular hate for me; it really grates for some reason.

Ahaha, yes, it's one of my pet peeves too. It turns up all the time in fanfic, even good fanfic that has half a dozen betas.

Possibly related to me reading too much fanfic, but "your pliable friend"? Which is "convenient and discreet"? Let's just say a credit card isn't the first thing I thought of, there.

Pervert!