Re: The Biggest Media Fails Of 2024

On 2025-01-03 10:48 PM, The Horny Goat wrote:

On Fri, 3 Jan 2025 16:35:14 -0500, Rhino
<no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:
 

I posted here a few years back about a young woman who was working at a
magazine who was asked by her editor to make a couple of small changes
in an article she (the young woman) had written, including fixing the
spelling of "hampster" but the young woman insisted that it was spelled
with a 'p', even when the editor politely showed her otherwise in a
dictionary. Rather than graciously admitting her error, the young woman
called her mother at work and demanded that her mother tell the editor
that she (the daughter) should be allowed to spell "hamster" with a 'p'
- and the mother actually had a verbal battle with the editor to defend
her daughter's misspelling! I want to believe that this sort of thing is
just a one-off fluke but I'm really not sure.
>

My daughter (who lives with me) has been working from home 4 days a
week (1 day downtown) since 2021 and I can't imagine talking to her
employers except in the context of a major health crisis.
 She's 35 years old, bright and barring an emergency situation can
speak for herself.
 The idea of using me as a spell checker is ridiculous even though my
spelling is pretty good.

I can't believe that the young woman in the anecdote still insisted on spelling it "hampster" even after having been shown the correct spelling in a reference book by her boss and then doubling down by getting her mom to try to defend the misspelling.
This speaks of some truly bizarre things in her schooling, like teachers who insisted that all spelling is arbitrary and that it was perfectly okay to spell words any way you like because others will surely understand what you mean and making you spell in some standard way is "oppressive" in some way.
That is essentially what the ideologues in the Ontario Ministry of Education decided about the time I started high school because that is exactly when they stopped teaching spelling or grammar and stopped docking you marks for spelling or grammar errors in your school work. In grades 7 and 8, we had a full class each and every day on spelling and grammar. In all of high school - and we had 5 years of high school in Ontario until about 20 years back - I had a single 40 minute lecture that looked at grammar in the entire 5 years.
--
Rhino