British aristocracy has been pronouncing their own surnames wrong for centuries on purpose. Cholmondeley is "Chumley" Featherstonehaugh is "Fanshaw." If you read it phonetically you mark yourself as an outsider. The misstake is the membership card. (Heck, even in Portland we locals hear about misprouncing Couch St probably every year in local press as some bar for membership to our own locals only vibe.)
I don't really see that as the same thing as what the article was pointing out. Those are shibboleths that only an insider would know. You have to get the pronunciation of Cholmondeley or Couch "right" to pass for an insider.
The random misspellings, missing spaces, sloppy grammar, etc in the examples in the article seem different to me. Misspelling "en route" as "enriewu" doesn't show, "look, I know the secret country club spelling for en route". It simply shows that you don't have to care about your mistakes. You write something that approximates what you mean, and you're too important to spend time revising. The mistake could be "enrout" or "n route" or on any other word. But you're not going to be a try-hard who edits and frets over their messages, you're blessing someone with 10 seconds of your attention and they're lucky to receive your correspondence, typos and all.
It's absolutely a power move, but it's also what happens when people are surrounded by sycophants who never correct them and will take time to decipher what they mean.
And over years, sloppy typing (forgivable) evolves into sloppy thinking.
I don't necessarily think it's that... it's just a matter of a rush to respond/send quickly and not take a lot of time. It's pretty easy to either fat-finger when typing on a keyboard, or gesture input on a phone to get the wrong word and you hit send before realizing.
Sometimes I'll notice right after, delete and re-reply (social media) other times I'll just let it be... It's pedantic busy bodies that will single you out for a typo as opposed to discussing the idea at hand.
In New Orleans, protesters against outsiders acquiring and developing real estate hold up signs that read "Say Tchoupitoulas" (/ˌtʃɑp ə ˈtuː ləs/). I give my wife lots of hassle about the pronunciantions of Louisiana place names like Tchoupitoulas, Natchitoches, etc. especially when she complains about northeastern place names like "Leominster".
Note that you only pronounce Couch that way in Portland when talking about the street. You wouldn’t maintain the pronunciation when saying eg “Sorry for spilling wine on your couch”
There's also the British penchant for deliberately mispronouncing French words. I have heard "renaissance" pronounced "reh-NAY-sance", "fillet" pronounced "fill-it", "valet" as "val-it" and so on. I think it's a national point of pride to pronounce the words of their neighbor incorrectly.
I'm always amused by some mispronunciations that stray farther away from the original than necessary.
My favorite is probably crepe, which Americans pronounce like an almost diphthong-y craype (or crape like grape I guess) when crep (like step) would do just fine and be closer to the original.
But as a native French and basically-native American speaker, I also couldn't really care less about it, or about things like Americans pronouncing the t in croissant, or French people being unable to say the.
"Valet" and "cadet" is an interesting pair: they rhyme in French (/va.lɛ/ and /ka.dɛ/), but rhyming them in English would be ... unusual.
If there were just French words pronounced in a French way and English words which came from French and are now pronounced in an English way that would be bad enough but in fact we have a whole spectrum of bastardisation.
Those are the standard British pronunciations, if you meant 'I have heard' as though it might be a niche or occasional occurrence. ('fill-ay' et al. are AmE pronunciations.)
It's not always that way though, consider 'niche': it's AmE that decided it's 'nitch'!
Yep. And try "lieutenant" or "herb" on for size. (Edit: I guess "herb" is a bit of a complex one... originally from Latin's "herba" where the H was pronounced, but from UK it came most immediately from French's "herbe" with no H sound. So UK did somehow shortcut back to a more original sound.)
So this isn't the British being deliberate obtuse, foreigners pronounce English words wrong all the time and we don't accuse them of doing it on purpose. They do it because that's how they would pronounce those words in their language.
Fillet/valet are mis-pronounced because of mallet, pallet, etc. Renaissance? Nail, snail, tail, etc.
It really is that simple, we're just pronouncing them as if they were an English word.
There are a handful of neighborhood and street names used in Toronto (not necessarily from Toronto) that have unusual pronunciations. Here I'll give some triples of (English spelling, actual pronunciation (IPA), a naive pronunciation (IPA)):
That's great. What's also amusing is how you felt it necessary to provide the diacritical pronunciation guide for "Vaughan"... because I think to most native English speakers we can't imagine any other pronunciation!
I think native English speaker who had never heard of Vaughan (sure we can find some of those) would likely to pronounce it like "Vog-un" - /ˈvɒɡən/ or "Vog-han" - /ˈvɑːɡən/
This sent me down a mental rabbit hole, I think it's one of those interesting nuances that are rules that native speakers follow without being able to name it, or know it.
I'm a native speaker, and also thought `vawn` was the most obvious pronounciation.
I'm guessing it's because `augh` is perceived as a recognizable vowel cluster where `gh` tends to be silent (daughter, caught, naught, taught). The interesting twist for me is that `laugh` is in obvious counter example, until I realized that gh in final position (laugh, rough, enough) is almost always \f\. And further, in words like laughter, roughness, we immediately distinguish a modified root word from the lexical position.
Maybe there's also an interesting thread to pull on in that the pattern may be more pronounced for names (e.g. Hughes). Just ruminating here though, I don't have a source for any of this.
Grammar at its best promotes clear communication but more often is used as a social tool of control and exclusion. When you are already talking to people within your in-group, that impulse isn’t necessary.
On some level. Thing is it is visible and everybody knows what the standards are, social mobility is possible under the sign of grammar.
If the game is wearing a $20k watch or understanding the covert signs of status that you might find in a particular community, that's something different.
> But in another instance, Epstein was critical of misspelling. A contact forwarded the sex offender his daughter’s college application in 2013. “I wish you had let me review before sending…the grammatical errors and spelling mistakes will make it at least harder for early admission,” Epstein wrote.
It is funny that spelling and grammar matter more when writing to an admissions officer than to a potential business partner. But it’s also funny to imagine a world where you could send in an essay with a bunch of typos and grammar mistakes and expect it not to influence your application.
Spelling and grammar matter in the sense that they are a signal that you know a complicated and somewhat arbitrary set of rules and have agreed to follow them.
Most of these people are legitimately stupid. This article is also pretty stupid for focusing on grammar and spelling when the content of these emails is also quite moronic.
I don't think Larry Summers was fired for hanging out with Epstein and talking terribly about women with him; I'm sure plenty of people knew that he was an Epstein-type and hung in Epstein-type circles, and he publicly said horrible things about women's capacities, to people he barely knew.
I think he was fired for sounding like a subnormal reddit dweller. Simply seeming like a mediocre dumb guy. The idea that he was teaching their precious children was simply repellent to Harvard alums. It makes it even more of an obscenity that he was in charge of the government response to the housing bubble, and for running up the stock market in the late 90s. It's so much worse when you confirm the awful acts were done by an actually dumb guy.
You want to fool yourself into thinking that these monsters were trapped by some bad premise within some elaborately reasoned theory or at least unfortunately tripped up by a sign error or a transposed digit buried somewhere. Nope, just a guy whose job is to sit in a chair with a bunch of qualifying paper around his name, and do the things that his backers pay him to do. An elite robosigner. They're not even charming or handsome.
That's just how busy people type. You see it a lot if you communicate with upper managers/Csuite regularly. They don't have anyone to impress in private emails, as long as the message is communicated well enough. Before smartphones/autocorrect/dictation it was worse.
> Before smartphones/autocorrect/dictation it was worse.
Not sure I agree. I remember e-mails being capitalized and punctuated.
It's not so much typos and laziness as much as incomplete thoughts and distraction. Communication as a whole has devolved from an e-mail with a complete thought and some details to a text or chat message without capitalization, punctuation or context.
The lack of capitalization and punctuation are just a tell to me that the sender didn't put thought into it.
I can't tell you how many times I get a chat message asking a question. I in return ask questions about context, and explain why I'm asking. Then the original sender gets annoyed and provides context. Then I ask more questions. Then the original sender gets quiet. Then I get an invite to a meeting to discuss with a wider audience.
I think you're right. I've gone back and read some of my own posts here and winced at what the combination of one-handed typing as I hold onto a handrail on a packed subway plus autocorrect did to what I thought I was saying.
I make an effort to use correct spelling and grammar in everything I write that's longer than "ok i'll check when at office", but sometimes it slips past. People still seem to understand what I'm telling them, though, and that's the ultimate goal.
Activation energy of a letter vs. an email. If you have to handwrite it and it takes ~days to arrive, you write fewer communiques and put more into the ones you do, but a lot goes unsaid.
You see it start to change with the telegraph on down to where we are today.
> You see it start to change with the telegraph on down to where we are today.
Telegrams were paid by the word, and were all uppercase by design, they're not an evolution of language. It took more effort to adapt your message to a telegram than to write a proper sentence.
Not so sure. After my father died I came across a box of old letters that were sent between he and his friends, from their early college years. Just personal, casual correspondence, which today would be done with a messaging app or email. Even on the short notes, the structure, spelling, grammar, and even the penmanship is excellent compared to what I see people of the same age doing today.
You had to dedicate so many more resources to that, though. Mailing a letter requires gathering up paper, a pen, an envelope, a stamp, and the person's address, then physically transporting it to a mailbox. It also has a lot of inherent latency, so you have to pack a lot of content into the message because it'll take as much effort into clarifying something you left out on the first message. It's natural to put more care into something you've invested that much baseline effort into.
I wouldn't spend nearly as much effort on something ephemeral and instant. For instance, I'm not going to mail my sister in another state a letter saying "ok thanks". I very while might text her that, because 1) she knows exactly what I'm referring to — the thing we were talking about 11 seconds earlier; 2) the customs of messaging mean she doesn't expect or want a wall of text; and 3) if she has any more questions, she can ask them and I'll reply within a minute or two.
Nope. I have a bunch of family letters, and my great-grandmother put more effort into writing simple "Happy <holiday-name>!" postcards than some people do for their college applications. And she worked on a farm, and only had just 5 years of formal education.
The modern devolution of spelling is just not giving a fuck about norms and courtesy.
> That's just how busy people type. You see it a lot if you communicate with upper managers/Csuite regularly. They don't have anyone to impress in private emails, as long as the message is communicated well enough.
There is a time pressure to communicate this way, but I think it's generally a management mistake:
Managment includes leadership (usually). Your messages are most of what most people in the organization see of you. You set the high bar; nobody will prioritize quality and attention to detail more than you. And that standard is global IME - you can't very effectively set the example that messages can be sloppy but nothing else.
For messages to my social inner circle, for example, I am much less careful - misspellings, abbreviations, etc. For messages to people I manage or lead, I make sure it's perfect every time.
Messages from the CEO to the whole company should be carefully checked, and in my experience they seem to be. Spelling/grammar is just a tiny part of check, there is also the whole inclusive language/not offensive to anyone set of checks, and the is this even legal check (perhaps more, that is what I can think of offhand).
Messages to a single vice president get much less care.
I agree that's the reality, but that VP will follow your example - as a leader, excellence is a performance, a superficial presentation for others, not something to do in private. Also, it's normal to not take your reportees seriously (to some degree).
I see this at my $megagorp job. The top brass don't do that much written communication, but when they do they are absolutely shooting from the hip. It's not as bad as Epstein but it's a strong "I've already started reading the next email while I'm typing this one" vibes.
FWIW I don't have a problem with it at all. As the article mentioned there's an aspect of power politics (I'm important enough not to have to worry about formatting). But to me instead of <I wish elites weren't so callous with text> I feel <everyone should feel empowered to write like that> (again, maybe not quite to the level of Epstein, but e.g. capitalisation is just unimportant. Signing off emails with "best wishes" is not a good use of anyone's 500 milliseconds).
>capitalisation is just unimportant. Signing off emails with "best wishes" is not a good use of anyone's 500 milliseconds
Yet I'm on Twitter reading "Prison for attempted murderer enablers like this clown" by the world's richest man who is tweeting all day. My guess is that it has just become a way of status signalling more than anything else.
My take, after spending years in the prep-school-to-Ivy pipeline: it's not a lack of education, it's a signaling mechanic.
For most of us, grammar is a proxy for competence. We proofread because a mistake could cost us a grade, client, or a job. But the ultra-rich are basically operating post-economically. They aren’t trying to advance; they started rich and they’ll end rich, so they have absolutely no one to impress (and certainly not you).
When you grow up in an environment where friction is historically outsourced—where papers are bought, tutors do the heavy lifting, or SATs are taken by proxies—you never really get held to the same operational standards. You just learn to slop it across the finish line because the consequences for failure are zero.
So who are they trying to impress with their grammar? Nobody. It actually becomes a display of asymmetric leverage. Taking the time to craft a perfect, well-punctuated email screams, "I spent my valuable time optimizing this for you." A typo-ridden, lowercase, one-sentence reply sends the exact opposite message. It establishes a power dynamic where their two seconds of raw attention is the most valuable commodity in the exchange. Following spelling conventions is just middle-class anxiety; sloppiness is the flex. All conventions are for the plebs anyway.
Plus, low-fidelity communication gives them incredible optionality. A garbled, ambiguous text provides perpetual wiggle room. They weren't late or wrong, it was just a typo. It allows them to remain completely non-committal—just another way to maintain high status while shedding any actual accountability.
I think a more likely reason, that for some reason, a lot of people don't want to talk about, is that these "Global Elite" aren't really that smart, creative, or articulate. That they've gotten to where they are despite, not because of their communication skills. They're not being "typical unconventional / quirky entrepreneurs." They're simply C students who knew the right people.
Taking the time to craft a well-formed message requires a degree of empathy. The golden rule suggests that we write messages in a way that dignifies the recipient. The Global Elite may lack these traits and sensibilities.
There's some of that but I remember 15 years ago this investor in our startup emailed the founder and misspelled the name of the startup that they had just pumped a significant amount of money into :-)
The founders said it was very 'senior' of him and laughed about it. But it's also kind of indicative of seniority because senior people aren't wasting time looking up the correct spelling of a company name - they get the email out with the salient details with the right amount of time invested into it. You want to be dialed in but also if you're doing lots of stuff at scale it doesn't really matter what the name of the startup is. Ideally you did the right diligence before the decision to invest was made but then at that point only a few key things matter and are worth keeping in hot memory any more - things like where the founders went to college (in case it helps with a future connection), what the market is (in case it helps with a future connection), what they need help with (in case it can be brought up with a connection), etc...
or efficiency is more important because you have a high load of people you need to interact with. I was a grammer nazi back in the day but stopped caring because the ROI is minimal and I've got shit to do that's more important. so maybe it's the same for them
I've never understood the "efficiency / ROI" argument. What is the "Investment"? What's the time delta between using the shift key and not using the shift key? Does it even add up to one second per year? What's the accumulated time loss from spelling "grammar" properly?
If the delta is simply "cognitive load" then we're back to the theory I already posted.
They're willing to boil the oceans to write better emails and, alternately, not have to read emails others have sent. So I don't think it's a lack of desire. I suspect it's more atrophying of ability to put effort into anything.
By your logic, you didn't put in much effort into your message. Besides not capitalizing the first letter of every sentence, everything else looks great though for me, and I'd imagine it was low effort for you. Those messages between billionaire read like the worst texts from low IQ teenagers.
I think you're right. Only people trying to look up care about appearances, a millionaire CEO will reply with "sounds good - Sent From Outlook for Iphone", while the intern will write a full thesis level reply on why they need pto.
Yeah and it's really interesting watching people try to come up with alternate explanations. The people who rule us can't be this mid, otherwise the very concept of meritocracy is bunk.
Or at the very least, the things we tell ourselves are meritorious are not what actually what causes people to rise to the top of our society.
By the way I'm also astonished by their lack of taste. The Epstein properties give off a sinister vibe as one would expect, but watching -- for instance -- Architectural Digest videos you get the impression that either the property has been professionally staged with pottery barn/cb2 esthetic or it was decorated with painting-of-dogs-playing-poker levels of sophistication.
Not surprising I guess but you'd think someone with essentially unlimited budget who has complete dominion over their own time wouldn't end up living in an enormous, expensive, alienating ugg boot.
Exactly. Look at just the most recent conflict in Middle East. You think they would have freaking gamed out potential scenarios using AI or whatnot? Looks like nobody gamed out anything. It's all just seat of the pants.
The military has performed countless simulations and “what-if” exercises and thoroughly documented each one. They knew a war with Iran without boots on the ground doesn’t end with a decisive victory. Trump chose to ignore them and press ahead anyway.
You can’t really understand Trump’s decisions unless you understand that despite all evidence to the contrary, Trump himself truly believes he is the smartest person in the room, regardless of who else is in it; and he will not suffer anyone who dares to contradict him.
>Trump himself truly believes he is the smartest person in the room, regardless of who else is in it; and he will not suffer anyone who dares to contradict him.
I actually believe he has a crippling inferiority complex, which is why he leans so hard into bluster and bravado, why he surrounds himself with incompetent sycophants, and also why he's so vicious at even a hint of being slighted.
I think he probably knows, deep down, that he's mid at best and his most deep-seated fear is being perceived as insufficiently masculine, intelligent, powerful, wealthy, etc.
The fact that they did is likely why Trump fired one of his generals.
Ive worked in organizations like that where EVERYBODY knew something was a bad idea but upper management wanted to do it anyway. At some point you get frozen out if you dissent and nobody gives two halfs of a fuck about when it turns out you were right. Conformity is all that matters.
I truly believe this is it. People don't want to openly admit how dumb these Global Elite actually are, because it totally shatters the illusion that there's even a tiny shred of meritocracy in the world.
but spelling and grammar still isn't a good indicator for expertise, intelligence or anything like that even in an academic context
Mainly:
1. Dyslexia doesn't make you dump, just likely to misspell and a less likely to notice your misspelling.
2. When speaking about neurodivergence people mainly think about Autism or ADHD but sometimes just mean that your brain thinks in very different patters, this can make grammar hard. Especially if it's not your native language.
3. Sometimes people had shitty situations earlier in their live, leading to incorrectly learning parts of languages. This is hard to fix. But isn't really representative in any way for their expertise in any topic which isn't the given languages grammar.
4. English grammar and pronunciation to spelling mapping aren't exactly well designed. People not wanting to bother with it is not really related to intelligence, or excellence in other topics.
5. Some kinds of expertise are unrelated to general intelligence, expertise, education. So even if spelling and grammar where related to intelligence, it wouldn't be meaningful to judge expertise.
I think the grammar/spelling is just one (perhaps low-signal) sign. But a lot of these people really are not that intelligent. And not just the GlobalElite™. Think of the guy who owns the local car dealership or owns 20 laundromats in the surrounding 3 counties. These guys are not geniuses, either. They just happen to own things that make them rich.
I worked with a tech founder at one point in my life, and I once happened to get a glance at his undergrad college transcripts which were, for reasons unknown, just sitting out on his desk. It was all Ds and Cs. He barely graduated! Yet his networth was more than the combined net worth of all of his employees.
Your GPA isn't necessarily a measure of your intelligence. I graduated with a 2.01 GPA from college, because I spent most of my time learning about technology and things that interested me, and doing the bare minimum to pass my classes.
But my diploma still says "UC Berkeley" on it, just like the guys with the 3.9 GPA. And when I hang out with PhD friends' PhD friends, they just assume I'm a PhD too.
So what I'm saying is that sometimes smart people don't put a lot of effort into school.
I can't tell my kid with a straight face, "Work hard, study, get good grades in school, and focus on a good career" when I know it's fucking bullshit. And what I should be saying is "Sorry that I'm not rich and well connected--since that would have been the outsized predictor of your life success."
That may be the case. Also, a man's intelligence is usually not evenly distributed among all of his different psychological facets. One can be extremely smart in some ways and extremely incompetent in other ways. So some of the global elite might actually be extremely smart when it comes to a few key things and total morons in other ways.
If your theory is correct and the global elite really isn't significantly smarter than the average population then the next question is, how are they maintaining their spots against smarter competitors?
> If your theory is correct and the global elite really isn't significantly smarter than the average population then the next question is, how are they maintaining their spots against smarter competitors?
This question is only difficult to answer if we believe that our system operates on merit. A system that operates on power, connections, and backroom favors happily maintains the status of mediocre people.
Well, then the theory that they are stupid is false, since at the least they are very smart at blackmail, lying, cunning, manipulation, backstabbing, machiavellianism, etc.
Yep. They're stupid at what the general public considers intelligence, generally academic excellence. But they're smart at doing whatever it takes to get to the top.
I generally agree in that I don't see them as particularly brilliant, though I think the average is higher and there is a much higher minimum in some capabilities.
And corruption of power is the cause, I suspect. It has poisoned human minds in all places and times; none of us are immune (which is why we design governments that limit individual power). An early lesson in being in charge was that, having nobody to whom I reported, who would see my work and compel me to a high standard, I let things slip.
Reportees rarely help you: Often they don't know what you do; when they do see it, they assume it's acceptable - you know what you want, and you set the standard of quality and establish the norms. Generally they have obvious disincentives against disapproving of you, and not just as some political tactic but for personal comfort: days are much more pleasant if your boss is friendly. They will give positive or at least non-negative responses to most substandard boss work.
I had to learn to think of it in two ways: First, would I accept this work from someone reporting to me? Second, I internalized the medium- and long-term consequences of substandard leadership and management: once your organization has caught that disease, once that's your reputation, it's very hard to change.
>That they've gotten to where they are despite, not because of their communication skills
Reminds me how I double and triple check the emails I sent out to the higher ups in the company to make sure spelling and language tone was good, while in his emails Epstein was like "wazzup retards, kiddie fiddling party at my place" and getting replies from 3 world leaders and 5 CEOs. Then him and Israel's' former PM were both struggling to spell PALANTIR over the phone. It's a big club and you're not in it.
It's more just selection for sociopathy and backstabbing. Don't even get me started on technical ability; the engineering standards at even the highest echelons are at times apppalling.
This could be read as a condemnation of the text input interfaces we've designed; the users are busy and have little choice. Typing on a phone still is awful:
* Very time-consuming, especially for edits/corrections
* Lacks functionality (where is undo? the right/left arrow keys?) and other functionality is very poor (mouse/pointer control)
* Frustrating!
* Consumes attention: I can type on a full keyboard while looking elsewhere - including talking to someone else, though of course all actions suffer. On full keyboards I can type while reading something, to transcribe it, or I can just watch the output. Or just imagine using keyboard-based commands (e.g., Vim) on a smartphone.
I've tried alternative screen keyboards and they are a bit better, but it still sucks a lot.
Doing anything on a phone is a miserable experience, even compared to using a laptop, which is already a lot worse than a desktop with good input devices. IMO it's shocking how many professionals are willing to tolerate such bad interfaces. Compare how picky professional musicians are about the exact components and setups of their instruments. No amount of convenience should lure you into accepting touch screens.
touch screen phones are a useful compromise. If I'm going to write a lot I want a real keyboard and large monitor with all the features thereof. However often I just need a quick note and I'm not in the office. I would not carry a desktop computer to the airport (I'm old enough to remember the IBM XT luggable computer - built in CRT monitor, not battery: it was portable, but it was a real workout). A laptop is sometimes useful, and it isn't too bad to have one in a backpack, but it is still big and so won't be with you. A phone is the correct size of have in your pocket so you can "do something" while "the refs try to figure out which rule applies to this play".
Phones will always be miserable - but they are the least miserable option in a lot of situations and so I expect people to use them a lot just because the other tools are even worse.
Phones (really, the pocket/handheld form factor) are a necessity and are limited; I agree. We could deliver better text input interfaces for them.
For heavy typers, physical keyboards in candybar phones (.e.g, old Blackberrys, etc.) and landscape-oriented clamshells fix many issues, but those are outre for some reason. Even on-screen UIs could be better. Just arrow keys to move to the cursor precisely would be a signficant improvement.
The first Android phone had a physical keyboard and a little trackball. The rest of the phone was a bit anemic even by the standards of the time but those two features were glorious.
I think the blackberry I had before the current trend of full touchscreen smartphones was the only cellphone I ever enjoyed using for the device itself.
Bingo. I have oft opined that the switch to an audiovisual culture was (bandwidth and compute gains notwithstanding) simply due to the piss poor ergonomics of the touch screen.
IRC was a literate culture, owing to its roots in the physical medium of the typewriter. It imposed technical barriers to entry selecting for a minimum of intelligence.
After kneecapping the literate media by destroying this input mechanism with touch screens, the audiovisual media flooded in to fill the vacuum - and brought with it the illiterate masses who now all see themselves as amateur videographers, unencumbered from the previous burdens of needing to "read the fucking manual."
I use a bluetooth keyboard for typing on my phone unless I'm out in the world. The number of people who want to have long-form conversations through a phone interface is shocking to me since it's such an awful experience and there are so, so many available alternatives.
I'd agree UIs are a sh*tshow but just saying this misses the wide variety of things that can put under "language is usage". Of course, the article itself misses the way the reveals texts between current elites are more equivalent to the grunts of cigar smoking old boys in clubs than to formal business communication. And that's just scratching the surface of the implication of informal business and other language. "Is it laziness or power signaling?" - both in complex layers.
As a side note, I grew up in the era of typewriters and cursive and that "interface" was utterly miserable - composing at the typewriter was considered bad, a fair portion of people couldn't type and typists would/could be hired for various tasks. I was vastly heartened when PCs with word processors became available at the college computer center senior. I think text processing interfaces reach their apex around 2000s (fusing power and usability) but when something gets to certain optimality, it can only go down and that where phones are.
I end all of my sentences with periods and I was told that I have a negative attitude at work because of it. Seriously, my manager's advice was to stop ending my sentences with periods.
i sort of get it. or, at least, i can empathize with it.
my dad (in his 80s) ends 50%+ of his sentences in an ellipses. most people i know my age find it a bit jarring (is he mad? expecting more information?). and its not just him, ive met several people around the same age who have a similar habit in their writing.
so, when i had a similar conversation about coming across as rigid/negative with my emails, i figured it was a similar phenomenon between the younger generation and my generation as my generation and my dads. now i typically end with a "thanks!" to coworkers instead of "thanks.". not a big deal for me if it makes other people happier.
IIRC there was some psychological paper claiming that periods at the end of chat messages are bearing some emotional signal. I don't remember what it was exactly. I suppose your manager was too much into shitty psychological research.
There was a "right to be boring" lawsuit in France by an older employee who used vous instead of tu with his colleagues and subordinates, and was fired for it. He just wasn't comfortable in the informal register. If I recall correctly, he won.
I have used em dashes and semicolons for decades. The LLM appropriation of my writing style has been almost as devastating as their impending vaporization of my career path.
Yeah, I think this is the real answer here, not the elaborate social signaling/insider conspiracy takes. These are people who are communicating non-stop and are mostly are boomers who did not grow up on keyboards.
to me, the goal of written text is to put an idea or a concept in the mind of another person. _capitalization_ is one of those "arbitrary rules" that add absolutely nothing to this process unless you're using an obscure acronym.
in my mind, it's one of those ancient rules that are completely obsolete in the modern world. its only purpose is to allow others to say "i am better than you because i use this ancient rule that someone came up with a thousand years ago, so i'm smart and you're dumb".
being a non-native english speaker, removing capitalization from my writing removed a ton of anxiety when writing text and didn't change at all the landing of my messages or my ideas.
WELL, THE CAPITAL LETTER FORMS WERE THE ORIGINAL ONES, THEN LOWERCASE ONES WERE CREATED BECAUSE THEY WERE FASTER FOR THE MONKS TO WRITE WHO WERE COPYING BOOKS. SOURCE: ROMAN RUINS. WE'RE NOT MONKS SO DEF COMPLETELY OBSOLETE. SO IF YOU WANT TO THROW OUT THE CAPITALIZATION RULES ENTIRELY, DO IT RIGHT AND USE ALL CAPS. THIS WOULD DEFINITELY MAKE IDEAS EASIER TO TRANSMIT AND RECEIVE.
Beat me to this joke by a few minutes. Today seems like non-capitalization is the fad, but there was a time when all caps was the fad, at least in Spanish. It was mistakenly believed that capitals didn't need accents in Spanish, so illiterate people wrote all caps to avoid them. All lowercase feels the same.
my point wasn't about using the "original rules", on the contrary it was about discarding uneeded ones. totally missed the point, but hey thanks for your contribution.
It's hard to take your argument of "removing capitalization has made my writing better" seriously when your comment history shows that you do capitalize your written text. But leaving that aside:
Capitalization makes it easy for the reader to know where a concept ends and a new one begins. Without capitalization, your comment reads like a run-on sentence - a period in my display is 2px tall while a comma is 3.5px tall, the lack of capitalization makes my brain read them all as commas, and therefore your text is harder for me to parse. So I'd say yes, removing capitals did change the landing of your ideas for the worse.
That reminds me of an interaction I had with a foreign exchange intern at my uni. I was working in an organization that organized these exchanges and I was giving him the orientation on his first day, including introducing him to his employer. The employer wanted him to write an email to some other person in the company, and he 1st wrote it with no caps n txtspeak, and when he was done he went back through it so it would have proper sentences...
If you want something to be clear you need to take time to re-read and revise it. If you really want to be sure there needs to be a full day between writing and revision (otherwise you will read what you meant to write, not what you actually wrote). For a presumably non-native speaker I expect he needed that extra effort.
Technically I should wait a day to hey the reply button here. I don't see anything wrong with this post now, but it is a reasonable bet that there is something that someone else sees.
Haha, yeah. I was face palming some obvious typos in an important email earlier. Even after reading it four times. I find this helps in writing music as well. I come back a day later and so many things stick out that my brain would just gloss over.
> It's hard to take your argument of "removing capitalization has made my writing better" seriously when your comment history shows that you do capitalize your written text.
right, because i couldn't have adopted this writing style in the past few weeks.
to address your second point, i could probably make better use of punctuation, but the original message is still delivered without all the fluff IMO.
Yes... though I think Chesterton's fence definitely belongs in the "technically correct advice that actually does more harm than good" bucket, like "premature optimisation", "if it works don't fix it", the Unix philosophy and so on.
This doesn't apply to capitalisation, but generally especially in computing if there's something that looks useless you should remove it. If it breaks the fault lies with whomever left something useless there without a note to explain it.
The current project I'm working on has about 3 copies of every component because nobody bothers to clear up after themselves - dead code isn't doing any harm and it's better to leave it in case it's needed right?
Well sure, if you want me to work about 3x slower than I otherwise could. Not an exaggeration.
> _capitalization_ is one of those "arbitrary rules"
If you're going to qualify capitalization as an arbitrary rule, then it wouldn't matter if it's all lowercase or all uppercase. It's not a whim of scholars, it improves readability, it emphasizes, it carries meaning.
All uppercase looks loud today, but early computers were also all uppercase and it was normal. All lowercase looks bland and sloppy, only a few steps removed from "what u doing lol?" texting shorthand.
My personal take is that it's easier for me to read your sentences if you help me see where they begin and end and this is part of capitalization's value. So at least for me your goal of putting ideas in my mind may be a little less effective
British aristocracy has been pronouncing their own surnames wrong for centuries on purpose. Cholmondeley is "Chumley" Featherstonehaugh is "Fanshaw." If you read it phonetically you mark yourself as an outsider. The misstake is the membership card. (Heck, even in Portland we locals hear about misprouncing Couch St probably every year in local press as some bar for membership to our own locals only vibe.)
I don't really see that as the same thing as what the article was pointing out. Those are shibboleths that only an insider would know. You have to get the pronunciation of Cholmondeley or Couch "right" to pass for an insider.
The random misspellings, missing spaces, sloppy grammar, etc in the examples in the article seem different to me. Misspelling "en route" as "enriewu" doesn't show, "look, I know the secret country club spelling for en route". It simply shows that you don't have to care about your mistakes. You write something that approximates what you mean, and you're too important to spend time revising. The mistake could be "enrout" or "n route" or on any other word. But you're not going to be a try-hard who edits and frets over their messages, you're blessing someone with 10 seconds of your attention and they're lucky to receive your correspondence, typos and all.
It's absolutely a power move, but it's also what happens when people are surrounded by sycophants who never correct them and will take time to decipher what they mean.
And over years, sloppy typing (forgivable) evolves into sloppy thinking.
I don't necessarily think it's that... it's just a matter of a rush to respond/send quickly and not take a lot of time. It's pretty easy to either fat-finger when typing on a keyboard, or gesture input on a phone to get the wrong word and you hit send before realizing.
Sometimes I'll notice right after, delete and re-reply (social media) other times I'll just let it be... It's pedantic busy bodies that will single you out for a typo as opposed to discussing the idea at hand.
>It simply shows that you don't have to care about your mistakes.
Interesting, is that the equivalent of billionaires wearing sweatpants?
In New Orleans, protesters against outsiders acquiring and developing real estate hold up signs that read "Say Tchoupitoulas" (/ˌtʃɑp ə ˈtuː ləs/). I give my wife lots of hassle about the pronunciantions of Louisiana place names like Tchoupitoulas, Natchitoches, etc. especially when she complains about northeastern place names like "Leominster".
> misstake
I see what you did there. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
A smelling pistake
That's just centuries of change without updating spelling, a la Leicester or Worcester.
Same as Texans asking where Houston Street is in NYC.
And likewise, Austin has a bunch of names that are pronounced oddly.
Manchaca checking in
But Houston Street is older than Sam Houston, and was always pronounced that way.
> in Portland we locals hear about misprouncing Couch St
That explains why many years ago when I visited Portland, a homeless guy corrected my pronunciation of that while we were walking past him.
Note that you only pronounce Couch that way in Portland when talking about the street. You wouldn’t maintain the pronunciation when saying eg “Sorry for spilling wine on your couch”
There's also the British penchant for deliberately mispronouncing French words. I have heard "renaissance" pronounced "reh-NAY-sance", "fillet" pronounced "fill-it", "valet" as "val-it" and so on. I think it's a national point of pride to pronounce the words of their neighbor incorrectly.
America is at least as guilty of mispronouncing non-english words it's just natural drift.
As to fillet and valet, they joined english before the contemporary french pronunciation, and are much closer to the middle-french.
I'm always amused by some mispronunciations that stray farther away from the original than necessary.
My favorite is probably crepe, which Americans pronounce like an almost diphthong-y craype (or crape like grape I guess) when crep (like step) would do just fine and be closer to the original.
But as a native French and basically-native American speaker, I also couldn't really care less about it, or about things like Americans pronouncing the t in croissant, or French people being unable to say the.
The plural is what gets me though crepes (just sounds weird as krehps vs krayps).
I kinda get it, but you can say step and stehps, not stayps, so why not krehps?
I say it the American way when I speak English anyway because that's just how it is. :)
>America is at least as guilty of mispronouncing non-english words it's just natural drift.
See also: Cairo, IL or Versailles, KY...
Is the Illinois one the same pronunciation as "KAY-ro", Georgia?
Notre Dame, IN
Or Wilkes-Barre, PA
Or Montpelier, VT!
Delhi, Ca -> Del-High
Fontainebleau State Park -> Fountain Blue State Park
These were two off the ones that really stood out from my travels.
Or Pueblo, Salida and Buena Vista CO
Calais, ME
Apparently, workers on the Gemini space program pronounced it "Jeh-mih-nee" back then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gemini#Pronunciation
"Valet" and "cadet" is an interesting pair: they rhyme in French (/va.lɛ/ and /ka.dɛ/), but rhyming them in English would be ... unusual.
If there were just French words pronounced in a French way and English words which came from French and are now pronounced in an English way that would be bad enough but in fact we have a whole spectrum of bastardisation.
Interestingly in British english valet would rhyme with cadet if you were referring to a servant and not to someone who will park your car.
Those are the standard British pronunciations, if you meant 'I have heard' as though it might be a niche or occasional occurrence. ('fill-ay' et al. are AmE pronunciations.)
It's not always that way though, consider 'niche': it's AmE that decided it's 'nitch'!
Yep. And try "lieutenant" or "herb" on for size. (Edit: I guess "herb" is a bit of a complex one... originally from Latin's "herba" where the H was pronounced, but from UK it came most immediately from French's "herbe" with no H sound. So UK did somehow shortcut back to a more original sound.)
As a Brit, my understanding of the American pronunciation was from Italian immigrants in the US.
Oybs
It's a national past time for us Brits to annoy the French. Kind of how two cousins who don't like each other would behave at a family gathering
So this isn't the British being deliberate obtuse, foreigners pronounce English words wrong all the time and we don't accuse them of doing it on purpose. They do it because that's how they would pronounce those words in their language.
Fillet/valet are mis-pronounced because of mallet, pallet, etc. Renaissance? Nail, snail, tail, etc.
It really is that simple, we're just pronouncing them as if they were an English word.
Here in Toronto area city of Vaughan pronounced as (/vɔːn/ or /vɑːn/) like in "dawn" or "gone"
Imaging me fresh from USSR asking someone how do I get to ... and getting blank stare
There are a handful of neighborhood and street names used in Toronto (not necessarily from Toronto) that have unusual pronunciations. Here I'll give some triples of (English spelling, actual pronunciation (IPA), a naive pronunciation (IPA)):
(Yonge, [jʌŋ], [jɑndʒ]); (Strachan, [sdʒɹɑn], [ˈsdʒɹa.tʃæn]); (Tecumseth, [tə.ˈkʌm.zi], [ˈti.kəm.sɛθ]); (Markham, [ˈmɑr.kʌm], [ˈmɑrk.hæm]), (Etobicoke, [ɛ.ˈtoʊ.bɪ.koʊ], [ɛ.ˈtoʊ.bɪ.koʊk]).
See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2cyg6bFeRc , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PmeDWvwD8M
That's because some are Indigenous names phoneticized for English speakers (Yonge and Markham on the other hand are entirely English names):
Etobicoke. From Adobigok [1]
Tecumseh (or Tecumseth). From tecumtha or takhamehse [2]
Mississauga. From Misi-zaagiing [3]
[1] https://www.etobicokehistorical.com/brief-history-of-etobico...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tecumseh
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississauga
That's great. What's also amusing is how you felt it necessary to provide the diacritical pronunciation guide for "Vaughan"... because I think to most native English speakers we can't imagine any other pronunciation!
I think native English speaker who had never heard of Vaughan (sure we can find some of those) would likely to pronounce it like "Vog-un" - /ˈvɒɡən/ or "Vog-han" - /ˈvɑːɡən/
This sent me down a mental rabbit hole, I think it's one of those interesting nuances that are rules that native speakers follow without being able to name it, or know it. I'm a native speaker, and also thought `vawn` was the most obvious pronounciation. I'm guessing it's because `augh` is perceived as a recognizable vowel cluster where `gh` tends to be silent (daughter, caught, naught, taught). The interesting twist for me is that `laugh` is in obvious counter example, until I realized that gh in final position (laugh, rough, enough) is almost always \f\. And further, in words like laughter, roughness, we immediately distinguish a modified root word from the lexical position.
Maybe there's also an interesting thread to pull on in that the pattern may be more pronounced for names (e.g. Hughes). Just ruminating here though, I don't have a source for any of this.
No, I don't think they would. I've never heard of Vaughan and assumed one syllable like the parent commenter.
No, "gh" is usually silent in English spelling.
augh is not as common as ough, but either one can make any sound in the whole syllabary.
How about Sequim, WA. Guess how to pronounciate that.
Laugh, trough, tough, rough. Maybe it should be "Vawfan"
Ghoul.
As a non-native English speaker I wonder if Leicester is naturally pronounced right for the natives, or has to be explicitly taught.
It has to be taught. Most english native speakers will say Lie-chester by default.
Typical in Toronto - remember there’s only one T in “Toronto”
There's also only one T in "Atlanta". (For some people there are none.)
...and the first o is silent, and the remaining o's are pronounced 'a'.
But the TV news reporters enunciate every letter in Toronto.
ROFL. I ignore this sacred rule
Is it the same reason as Worcestershire mapped to "wooster" ?
Plymouth -> plee-mooth not ply-mouth
Outsider! :-)
More like PLIM-uth. I guess there is no way to write it unambiguously in English
I hope you aren't talking about the one in Massachusetts which is not pronounced either of those ways
Plymouth, England is PLIM-uth
>Cholmondeley is "Chumley" Featherstonehaugh is "Fanshaw." If you read it phonetically you mark yourself as an outsider.
This is a monstrous crime against language.
well how do you say Newfoundland? Soon it will be said "Noovlan"
/ði ˈɡloʊbəl iˈliːt (ən ˈɛvriˌwʌn ɛls) ʃəd swɪtʃ tə fəˈnɛtɪk ˈspɛlɪŋ/
global elite and everyone else said switch to phonetic spelling?
Grammar at its best promotes clear communication but more often is used as a social tool of control and exclusion. When you are already talking to people within your in-group, that impulse isn’t necessary.
Everyone uses grammar. What you're describing is elitism and elevating one particular dialect above all others.
On some level. Thing is it is visible and everybody knows what the standards are, social mobility is possible under the sign of grammar.
If the game is wearing a $20k watch or understanding the covert signs of status that you might find in a particular community, that's something different.
Looking through the files, I just assumed that they were typing on a tiny keyboard and made typos.
> But in another instance, Epstein was critical of misspelling. A contact forwarded the sex offender his daughter’s college application in 2013. “I wish you had let me review before sending…the grammatical errors and spelling mistakes will make it at least harder for early admission,” Epstein wrote.
It is funny that spelling and grammar matter more when writing to an admissions officer than to a potential business partner. But it’s also funny to imagine a world where you could send in an essay with a bunch of typos and grammar mistakes and expect it not to influence your application.
Spelling and grammar matter in the sense that they are a signal that you know a complicated and somewhat arbitrary set of rules and have agreed to follow them.
>It is funny that spelling and grammar matter more when writing to an admissions officer than to a potential business partner
Things that matter in academia world don't always matter in the real world and vice versa.
Right, the deeper question is why it “matters” in academia and not business. Because in some sense academia is the real world.
> Because in some sense academia is the real world.
The old one; what's the difference between academia and the real world?
In academia, there is no difference.
I'm just plain cannot visit archive.* sites anymore. Just get a looping captcha.
Seemed to affect me in Firefox but not Safari, maybe something in cookies
Most of these people are legitimately stupid. This article is also pretty stupid for focusing on grammar and spelling when the content of these emails is also quite moronic.
I don't think Larry Summers was fired for hanging out with Epstein and talking terribly about women with him; I'm sure plenty of people knew that he was an Epstein-type and hung in Epstein-type circles, and he publicly said horrible things about women's capacities, to people he barely knew.
I think he was fired for sounding like a subnormal reddit dweller. Simply seeming like a mediocre dumb guy. The idea that he was teaching their precious children was simply repellent to Harvard alums. It makes it even more of an obscenity that he was in charge of the government response to the housing bubble, and for running up the stock market in the late 90s. It's so much worse when you confirm the awful acts were done by an actually dumb guy.
You want to fool yourself into thinking that these monsters were trapped by some bad premise within some elaborately reasoned theory or at least unfortunately tripped up by a sign error or a transposed digit buried somewhere. Nope, just a guy whose job is to sit in a chair with a bunch of qualifying paper around his name, and do the things that his backers pay him to do. An elite robosigner. They're not even charming or handsome.
That's just how busy people type. You see it a lot if you communicate with upper managers/Csuite regularly. They don't have anyone to impress in private emails, as long as the message is communicated well enough. Before smartphones/autocorrect/dictation it was worse.
> Before smartphones/autocorrect/dictation it was worse.
Not sure I agree. I remember e-mails being capitalized and punctuated.
It's not so much typos and laziness as much as incomplete thoughts and distraction. Communication as a whole has devolved from an e-mail with a complete thought and some details to a text or chat message without capitalization, punctuation or context.
The lack of capitalization and punctuation are just a tell to me that the sender didn't put thought into it.
I can't tell you how many times I get a chat message asking a question. I in return ask questions about context, and explain why I'm asking. Then the original sender gets annoyed and provides context. Then I ask more questions. Then the original sender gets quiet. Then I get an invite to a meeting to discuss with a wider audience.
I think you're right. I've gone back and read some of my own posts here and winced at what the combination of one-handed typing as I hold onto a handrail on a packed subway plus autocorrect did to what I thought I was saying.
I make an effort to use correct spelling and grammar in everything I write that's longer than "ok i'll check when at office", but sometimes it slips past. People still seem to understand what I'm telling them, though, and that's the ultimate goal.
> Before smartphones/autocorrect/dictation it was worse.
Ima call bullshit on this. Read the published letters of some historical figures.
Activation energy of a letter vs. an email. If you have to handwrite it and it takes ~days to arrive, you write fewer communiques and put more into the ones you do, but a lot goes unsaid.
You see it start to change with the telegraph on down to where we are today.
> You see it start to change with the telegraph on down to where we are today.
Telegrams were paid by the word, and were all uppercase by design, they're not an evolution of language. It took more effort to adapt your message to a telegram than to write a proper sentence.
Survivorship bias. You don't often read the notes where Thomas Jefferson jotted "hey martha riding to ftore be back later love you - Tommy".
Not so sure. After my father died I came across a box of old letters that were sent between he and his friends, from their early college years. Just personal, casual correspondence, which today would be done with a messaging app or email. Even on the short notes, the structure, spelling, grammar, and even the penmanship is excellent compared to what I see people of the same age doing today.
You had to dedicate so many more resources to that, though. Mailing a letter requires gathering up paper, a pen, an envelope, a stamp, and the person's address, then physically transporting it to a mailbox. It also has a lot of inherent latency, so you have to pack a lot of content into the message because it'll take as much effort into clarifying something you left out on the first message. It's natural to put more care into something you've invested that much baseline effort into.
I wouldn't spend nearly as much effort on something ephemeral and instant. For instance, I'm not going to mail my sister in another state a letter saying "ok thanks". I very while might text her that, because 1) she knows exactly what I'm referring to — the thing we were talking about 11 seconds earlier; 2) the customs of messaging mean she doesn't expect or want a wall of text; and 3) if she has any more questions, she can ask them and I'll reply within a minute or two.
Nope. I have a bunch of family letters, and my great-grandmother put more effort into writing simple "Happy <holiday-name>!" postcards than some people do for their college applications. And she worked on a farm, and only had just 5 years of formal education.
The modern devolution of spelling is just not giving a fuck about norms and courtesy.
I call bullshit on you comparing what was obviously a 2000s+ phenomenon with that of closer to the 1800s.
I didn't say 1800s. But also I thought "dictation" meant via a secretary. I guess they meant by voice recognition.
I thought the same.
"Dictated but not read."
> That's just how busy people type. You see it a lot if you communicate with upper managers/Csuite regularly. They don't have anyone to impress in private emails, as long as the message is communicated well enough.
There is a time pressure to communicate this way, but I think it's generally a management mistake:
Managment includes leadership (usually). Your messages are most of what most people in the organization see of you. You set the high bar; nobody will prioritize quality and attention to detail more than you. And that standard is global IME - you can't very effectively set the example that messages can be sloppy but nothing else.
For messages to my social inner circle, for example, I am much less careful - misspellings, abbreviations, etc. For messages to people I manage or lead, I make sure it's perfect every time.
Messages from the CEO to the whole company should be carefully checked, and in my experience they seem to be. Spelling/grammar is just a tiny part of check, there is also the whole inclusive language/not offensive to anyone set of checks, and the is this even legal check (perhaps more, that is what I can think of offhand).
Messages to a single vice president get much less care.
I agree that's the reality, but that VP will follow your example - as a leader, excellence is a performance, a superficial presentation for others, not something to do in private. Also, it's normal to not take your reportees seriously (to some degree).
>That's just how busy people type.
Lmao. If you think these people are busy, I have news for you.
Their schedules are usually quite full, but their work doesn't really resemble an average person's.
Their schedules are full of leisure, and they can't be arsed to extend even the oz of courteous effort that proper punctuation and grammar require.
And their class all recognize it. Possibly it's a class marker.
Here, I have to carefully articulate my point because I am desperately trying to convince you not to carry water for the Epstein a class.
What's your point? That everyone with a lot of wealth lives exactly the same, and is comparable to Epstein?
I'm not sure I understand.
I see this at my $megagorp job. The top brass don't do that much written communication, but when they do they are absolutely shooting from the hip. It's not as bad as Epstein but it's a strong "I've already started reading the next email while I'm typing this one" vibes.
FWIW I don't have a problem with it at all. As the article mentioned there's an aspect of power politics (I'm important enough not to have to worry about formatting). But to me instead of <I wish elites weren't so callous with text> I feel <everyone should feel empowered to write like that> (again, maybe not quite to the level of Epstein, but e.g. capitalisation is just unimportant. Signing off emails with "best wishes" is not a good use of anyone's 500 milliseconds).
>capitalisation is just unimportant. Signing off emails with "best wishes" is not a good use of anyone's 500 milliseconds
Yet I'm on Twitter reading "Prison for attempted murderer enablers like this clown" by the world's richest man who is tweeting all day. My guess is that it has just become a way of status signalling more than anything else.
My take, after spending years in the prep-school-to-Ivy pipeline: it's not a lack of education, it's a signaling mechanic.
For most of us, grammar is a proxy for competence. We proofread because a mistake could cost us a grade, client, or a job. But the ultra-rich are basically operating post-economically. They aren’t trying to advance; they started rich and they’ll end rich, so they have absolutely no one to impress (and certainly not you).
When you grow up in an environment where friction is historically outsourced—where papers are bought, tutors do the heavy lifting, or SATs are taken by proxies—you never really get held to the same operational standards. You just learn to slop it across the finish line because the consequences for failure are zero.
So who are they trying to impress with their grammar? Nobody. It actually becomes a display of asymmetric leverage. Taking the time to craft a perfect, well-punctuated email screams, "I spent my valuable time optimizing this for you." A typo-ridden, lowercase, one-sentence reply sends the exact opposite message. It establishes a power dynamic where their two seconds of raw attention is the most valuable commodity in the exchange. Following spelling conventions is just middle-class anxiety; sloppiness is the flex. All conventions are for the plebs anyway.
Plus, low-fidelity communication gives them incredible optionality. A garbled, ambiguous text provides perpetual wiggle room. They weren't late or wrong, it was just a typo. It allows them to remain completely non-committal—just another way to maintain high status while shedding any actual accountability.
I think a more likely reason, that for some reason, a lot of people don't want to talk about, is that these "Global Elite" aren't really that smart, creative, or articulate. That they've gotten to where they are despite, not because of their communication skills. They're not being "typical unconventional / quirky entrepreneurs." They're simply C students who knew the right people.
Taking the time to craft a well-formed message requires a degree of empathy. The golden rule suggests that we write messages in a way that dignifies the recipient. The Global Elite may lack these traits and sensibilities.
Same reason we all still wear suits I guess.
I can't relate to this message at all
There's some of that but I remember 15 years ago this investor in our startup emailed the founder and misspelled the name of the startup that they had just pumped a significant amount of money into :-)
The founders said it was very 'senior' of him and laughed about it. But it's also kind of indicative of seniority because senior people aren't wasting time looking up the correct spelling of a company name - they get the email out with the salient details with the right amount of time invested into it. You want to be dialed in but also if you're doing lots of stuff at scale it doesn't really matter what the name of the startup is. Ideally you did the right diligence before the decision to invest was made but then at that point only a few key things matter and are worth keeping in hot memory any more - things like where the founders went to college (in case it helps with a future connection), what the market is (in case it helps with a future connection), what they need help with (in case it can be brought up with a connection), etc...
...is it possible to do typosquatting on investment targets?
or efficiency is more important because you have a high load of people you need to interact with. I was a grammer nazi back in the day but stopped caring because the ROI is minimal and I've got shit to do that's more important. so maybe it's the same for them
I've never understood the "efficiency / ROI" argument. What is the "Investment"? What's the time delta between using the shift key and not using the shift key? Does it even add up to one second per year? What's the accumulated time loss from spelling "grammar" properly?
If the delta is simply "cognitive load" then we're back to the theory I already posted.
They're willing to boil the oceans to write better emails and, alternately, not have to read emails others have sent. So I don't think it's a lack of desire. I suspect it's more atrophying of ability to put effort into anything.
maybe. maybe they just stopped caring what others think or something
If you have time to post on Hacker News, you definitely have time for proper grammar.
And then there are people who go out of their way to disable iOS's automatic capitalization feature.
By your logic, you didn't put in much effort into your message. Besides not capitalizing the first letter of every sentence, everything else looks great though for me, and I'd imagine it was low effort for you. Those messages between billionaire read like the worst texts from low IQ teenagers.
I dunno, misspelling "grammar" as "grammer" isn't a great look in context.
you should get me on my iphone since the new auto correct fucks up my bad writing even more
You’re right.
Gotta be really incredibly efficient while planning your time on Epstein Island doing Epstein Class things to Epstein girls.
These world changing guys clearly have no spare time on their hands at all.
I think you're right. Only people trying to look up care about appearances, a millionaire CEO will reply with "sounds good - Sent From Outlook for Iphone", while the intern will write a full thesis level reply on why they need pto.
Yeah and it's really interesting watching people try to come up with alternate explanations. The people who rule us can't be this mid, otherwise the very concept of meritocracy is bunk.
Or at the very least, the things we tell ourselves are meritorious are not what actually what causes people to rise to the top of our society.
By the way I'm also astonished by their lack of taste. The Epstein properties give off a sinister vibe as one would expect, but watching -- for instance -- Architectural Digest videos you get the impression that either the property has been professionally staged with pottery barn/cb2 esthetic or it was decorated with painting-of-dogs-playing-poker levels of sophistication.
Not surprising I guess but you'd think someone with essentially unlimited budget who has complete dominion over their own time wouldn't end up living in an enormous, expensive, alienating ugg boot.
>The people who rule us can't be this mid, otherwise the very concept of meritocracy is bunk.
It is bunk. Nobody who has even a modicum of critical thinking ability thinks that Donald Trump or Elon Musk are geniuses.
Luck and circumstance are an immense part of success.
Exactly. Look at just the most recent conflict in Middle East. You think they would have freaking gamed out potential scenarios using AI or whatnot? Looks like nobody gamed out anything. It's all just seat of the pants.
All the people who had the job title of "War game Iran scenarios" were actually fired a month or so ago.
Competence in a senior position is a threat to an incompetocracy. It's more important you be stupid and loyal than be good.
The military has performed countless simulations and “what-if” exercises and thoroughly documented each one. They knew a war with Iran without boots on the ground doesn’t end with a decisive victory. Trump chose to ignore them and press ahead anyway.
You can’t really understand Trump’s decisions unless you understand that despite all evidence to the contrary, Trump himself truly believes he is the smartest person in the room, regardless of who else is in it; and he will not suffer anyone who dares to contradict him.
>Trump himself truly believes he is the smartest person in the room, regardless of who else is in it; and he will not suffer anyone who dares to contradict him.
I actually believe he has a crippling inferiority complex, which is why he leans so hard into bluster and bravado, why he surrounds himself with incompetent sycophants, and also why he's so vicious at even a hint of being slighted.
I think he probably knows, deep down, that he's mid at best and his most deep-seated fear is being perceived as insufficiently masculine, intelligent, powerful, wealthy, etc.
The fact that they did is likely why Trump fired one of his generals.
Ive worked in organizations like that where EVERYBODY knew something was a bad idea but upper management wanted to do it anyway. At some point you get frozen out if you dissent and nobody gives two halfs of a fuck about when it turns out you were right. Conformity is all that matters.
Even so a few people do publicly dissent.
Having rich parents is probably the biggest part.
I truly believe this is it. People don't want to openly admit how dumb these Global Elite actually are, because it totally shatters the illusion that there's even a tiny shred of meritocracy in the world.
this isn't wrong
but spelling and grammar still isn't a good indicator for expertise, intelligence or anything like that even in an academic context
Mainly:
1. Dyslexia doesn't make you dump, just likely to misspell and a less likely to notice your misspelling.
2. When speaking about neurodivergence people mainly think about Autism or ADHD but sometimes just mean that your brain thinks in very different patters, this can make grammar hard. Especially if it's not your native language.
3. Sometimes people had shitty situations earlier in their live, leading to incorrectly learning parts of languages. This is hard to fix. But isn't really representative in any way for their expertise in any topic which isn't the given languages grammar.
4. English grammar and pronunciation to spelling mapping aren't exactly well designed. People not wanting to bother with it is not really related to intelligence, or excellence in other topics.
5. Some kinds of expertise are unrelated to general intelligence, expertise, education. So even if spelling and grammar where related to intelligence, it wouldn't be meaningful to judge expertise.
I think the grammar/spelling is just one (perhaps low-signal) sign. But a lot of these people really are not that intelligent. And not just the GlobalElite™. Think of the guy who owns the local car dealership or owns 20 laundromats in the surrounding 3 counties. These guys are not geniuses, either. They just happen to own things that make them rich.
I worked with a tech founder at one point in my life, and I once happened to get a glance at his undergrad college transcripts which were, for reasons unknown, just sitting out on his desk. It was all Ds and Cs. He barely graduated! Yet his networth was more than the combined net worth of all of his employees.
Your GPA isn't necessarily a measure of your intelligence. I graduated with a 2.01 GPA from college, because I spent most of my time learning about technology and things that interested me, and doing the bare minimum to pass my classes.
But my diploma still says "UC Berkeley" on it, just like the guys with the 3.9 GPA. And when I hang out with PhD friends' PhD friends, they just assume I'm a PhD too.
So what I'm saying is that sometimes smart people don't put a lot of effort into school.
It's just really demoralizing.
I can't tell my kid with a straight face, "Work hard, study, get good grades in school, and focus on a good career" when I know it's fucking bullshit. And what I should be saying is "Sorry that I'm not rich and well connected--since that would have been the outsized predictor of your life success."
Trying to decide whether the mistakes in your response are deliberate or accidental.
Pretty grate either way.
That may be the case. Also, a man's intelligence is usually not evenly distributed among all of his different psychological facets. One can be extremely smart in some ways and extremely incompetent in other ways. So some of the global elite might actually be extremely smart when it comes to a few key things and total morons in other ways.
If your theory is correct and the global elite really isn't significantly smarter than the average population then the next question is, how are they maintaining their spots against smarter competitors?
> If your theory is correct and the global elite really isn't significantly smarter than the average population then the next question is, how are they maintaining their spots against smarter competitors?
This question is only difficult to answer if we believe that our system operates on merit. A system that operates on power, connections, and backroom favors happily maintains the status of mediocre people.
>how are they maintaining their spots against smarter competitors?
Blackmail, lying, cunning, manipulation, backstabbing, machiavellianism, etc,
You need to be intelligent at these, above all else.
Well, then the theory that they are stupid is false, since at the least they are very smart at blackmail, lying, cunning, manipulation, backstabbing, machiavellianism, etc.
Yep. They're stupid at what the general public considers intelligence, generally academic excellence. But they're smart at doing whatever it takes to get to the top.
I generally agree in that I don't see them as particularly brilliant, though I think the average is higher and there is a much higher minimum in some capabilities.
And corruption of power is the cause, I suspect. It has poisoned human minds in all places and times; none of us are immune (which is why we design governments that limit individual power). An early lesson in being in charge was that, having nobody to whom I reported, who would see my work and compel me to a high standard, I let things slip.
Reportees rarely help you: Often they don't know what you do; when they do see it, they assume it's acceptable - you know what you want, and you set the standard of quality and establish the norms. Generally they have obvious disincentives against disapproving of you, and not just as some political tactic but for personal comfort: days are much more pleasant if your boss is friendly. They will give positive or at least non-negative responses to most substandard boss work.
I had to learn to think of it in two ways: First, would I accept this work from someone reporting to me? Second, I internalized the medium- and long-term consequences of substandard leadership and management: once your organization has caught that disease, once that's your reputation, it's very hard to change.
>That they've gotten to where they are despite, not because of their communication skills
Reminds me how I double and triple check the emails I sent out to the higher ups in the company to make sure spelling and language tone was good, while in his emails Epstein was like "wazzup retards, kiddie fiddling party at my place" and getting replies from 3 world leaders and 5 CEOs. Then him and Israel's' former PM were both struggling to spell PALANTIR over the phone. It's a big club and you're not in it.
Neither of them could pronounce "palantir" let alone spell it. And they were talking about becoming board members.
It's more just selection for sociopathy and backstabbing. Don't even get me started on technical ability; the engineering standards at even the highest echelons are at times apppalling.
It's a lace-curtain thing to actually spell things properly, actual upstairs people don't give a toss thereabout.
Nothing says “I’m not AI” like a complete disregard for capitalization and grammar. It’s the ultimate authenticity signal in 2026.
Yeah of all my HN and reddit bots those who are prompted to produce bad grammar are the most successful
people love talking to them
This trend predates LLMS though.
yes ths is the obvvious reason
This could be read as a condemnation of the text input interfaces we've designed; the users are busy and have little choice. Typing on a phone still is awful:
* Very time-consuming, especially for edits/corrections
* Lacks functionality (where is undo? the right/left arrow keys?) and other functionality is very poor (mouse/pointer control)
* Frustrating!
* Consumes attention: I can type on a full keyboard while looking elsewhere - including talking to someone else, though of course all actions suffer. On full keyboards I can type while reading something, to transcribe it, or I can just watch the output. Or just imagine using keyboard-based commands (e.g., Vim) on a smartphone.
I've tried alternative screen keyboards and they are a bit better, but it still sucks a lot.
Doing anything on a phone is a miserable experience, even compared to using a laptop, which is already a lot worse than a desktop with good input devices. IMO it's shocking how many professionals are willing to tolerate such bad interfaces. Compare how picky professional musicians are about the exact components and setups of their instruments. No amount of convenience should lure you into accepting touch screens.
touch screen phones are a useful compromise. If I'm going to write a lot I want a real keyboard and large monitor with all the features thereof. However often I just need a quick note and I'm not in the office. I would not carry a desktop computer to the airport (I'm old enough to remember the IBM XT luggable computer - built in CRT monitor, not battery: it was portable, but it was a real workout). A laptop is sometimes useful, and it isn't too bad to have one in a backpack, but it is still big and so won't be with you. A phone is the correct size of have in your pocket so you can "do something" while "the refs try to figure out which rule applies to this play".
Phones will always be miserable - but they are the least miserable option in a lot of situations and so I expect people to use them a lot just because the other tools are even worse.
Phones (really, the pocket/handheld form factor) are a necessity and are limited; I agree. We could deliver better text input interfaces for them.
For heavy typers, physical keyboards in candybar phones (.e.g, old Blackberrys, etc.) and landscape-oriented clamshells fix many issues, but those are outre for some reason. Even on-screen UIs could be better. Just arrow keys to move to the cursor precisely would be a signficant improvement.
The first Android phone had a physical keyboard and a little trackball. The rest of the phone was a bit anemic even by the standards of the time but those two features were glorious.
I think the blackberry I had before the current trend of full touchscreen smartphones was the only cellphone I ever enjoyed using for the device itself.
Bingo. I have oft opined that the switch to an audiovisual culture was (bandwidth and compute gains notwithstanding) simply due to the piss poor ergonomics of the touch screen.
IRC was a literate culture, owing to its roots in the physical medium of the typewriter. It imposed technical barriers to entry selecting for a minimum of intelligence.
After kneecapping the literate media by destroying this input mechanism with touch screens, the audiovisual media flooded in to fill the vacuum - and brought with it the illiterate masses who now all see themselves as amateur videographers, unencumbered from the previous burdens of needing to "read the fucking manual."
>Typing on a phone still is awful
I use a bluetooth keyboard for typing on my phone unless I'm out in the world. The number of people who want to have long-form conversations through a phone interface is shocking to me since it's such an awful experience and there are so, so many available alternatives.
I do that a lot. My phone doesn't have spellcheck though - it assumes I'm using a keyboard with autocorrect.
I'd agree UIs are a sh*tshow but just saying this misses the wide variety of things that can put under "language is usage". Of course, the article itself misses the way the reveals texts between current elites are more equivalent to the grunts of cigar smoking old boys in clubs than to formal business communication. And that's just scratching the surface of the implication of informal business and other language. "Is it laziness or power signaling?" - both in complex layers.
As a side note, I grew up in the era of typewriters and cursive and that "interface" was utterly miserable - composing at the typewriter was considered bad, a fair portion of people couldn't type and typists would/could be hired for various tasks. I was vastly heartened when PCs with word processors became available at the college computer center senior. I think text processing interfaces reach their apex around 2000s (fusing power and usability) but when something gets to certain optimality, it can only go down and that where phones are.
nowadays, if you have correct spelling and grammar people accuse you of being an llm.
I end all of my sentences with periods and I was told that I have a negative attitude at work because of it. Seriously, my manager's advice was to stop ending my sentences with periods.
i sort of get it. or, at least, i can empathize with it.
my dad (in his 80s) ends 50%+ of his sentences in an ellipses. most people i know my age find it a bit jarring (is he mad? expecting more information?). and its not just him, ive met several people around the same age who have a similar habit in their writing.
so, when i had a similar conversation about coming across as rigid/negative with my emails, i figured it was a similar phenomenon between the younger generation and my generation as my generation and my dads. now i typically end with a "thanks!" to coworkers instead of "thanks.". not a big deal for me if it makes other people happier.
IIRC there was some psychological paper claiming that periods at the end of chat messages are bearing some emotional signal. I don't remember what it was exactly. I suppose your manager was too much into shitty psychological research.
There was a "right to be boring" lawsuit in France by an older employee who used vous instead of tu with his colleagues and subordinates, and was fired for it. He just wasn't comfortable in the informal register. If I recall correctly, he won.
In lieu of exclamation points? Or just run on chains of thought?
I don't find this at all. There's a certain style, or flourish, to LLM-ish writing that makes it noticeable. It's not just spelling and grammar.
I have used em dashes and semicolons for decades. The LLM appropriation of my writing style has been almost as devastating as their impending vaporization of my career path.
I don't understand where you "users of em dashes" are coming from
em dash isn't on the keyboard, where do you even find it?
https://archive.ph/wlwcA
Thanks! Added above.
It's just that this is how everyone types when typing quickly in a text message on their phone. Not much to see here
Yeah, I think this is the real answer here, not the elaborate social signaling/insider conspiracy takes. These are people who are communicating non-stop and are mostly are boomers who did not grow up on keyboards.
to me, the goal of written text is to put an idea or a concept in the mind of another person. _capitalization_ is one of those "arbitrary rules" that add absolutely nothing to this process unless you're using an obscure acronym. in my mind, it's one of those ancient rules that are completely obsolete in the modern world. its only purpose is to allow others to say "i am better than you because i use this ancient rule that someone came up with a thousand years ago, so i'm smart and you're dumb".
being a non-native english speaker, removing capitalization from my writing removed a ton of anxiety when writing text and didn't change at all the landing of my messages or my ideas.
WELL, THE CAPITAL LETTER FORMS WERE THE ORIGINAL ONES, THEN LOWERCASE ONES WERE CREATED BECAUSE THEY WERE FASTER FOR THE MONKS TO WRITE WHO WERE COPYING BOOKS. SOURCE: ROMAN RUINS. WE'RE NOT MONKS SO DEF COMPLETELY OBSOLETE. SO IF YOU WANT TO THROW OUT THE CAPITALIZATION RULES ENTIRELY, DO IT RIGHT AND USE ALL CAPS. THIS WOULD DEFINITELY MAKE IDEAS EASIER TO TRANSMIT AND RECEIVE.
Beat me to this joke by a few minutes. Today seems like non-capitalization is the fad, but there was a time when all caps was the fad, at least in Spanish. It was mistakenly believed that capitals didn't need accents in Spanish, so illiterate people wrote all caps to avoid them. All lowercase feels the same.
I read this as someone shouting, and cannot override the voice in my head to not-shout while reading it.
I love how aggressive capitals feel to me no matter the intent or tone.
This comment is just so much, all by virtue of caps lock.
Oh no, cortisol spike in my text-only forum.
ANDNOSPACESTHENPLEASE
ALSODONTFORGETTHEBOUSTROPHEDONSYSTEM
ວИIᑫᑫAЯWYᗺວИITIЯWƎUИITИOƆUOYᗺƎЯƎHW
LINESINREVERSE
my point wasn't about using the "original rules", on the contrary it was about discarding uneeded ones. totally missed the point, but hey thanks for your contribution.
I’m not sure why you’re using commas and double quotes and dots, they’re so unneeded!
It's hard to take your argument of "removing capitalization has made my writing better" seriously when your comment history shows that you do capitalize your written text. But leaving that aside:
Capitalization makes it easy for the reader to know where a concept ends and a new one begins. Without capitalization, your comment reads like a run-on sentence - a period in my display is 2px tall while a comma is 3.5px tall, the lack of capitalization makes my brain read them all as commas, and therefore your text is harder for me to parse. So I'd say yes, removing capitals did change the landing of your ideas for the worse.
That reminds me of an interaction I had with a foreign exchange intern at my uni. I was working in an organization that organized these exchanges and I was giving him the orientation on his first day, including introducing him to his employer. The employer wanted him to write an email to some other person in the company, and he 1st wrote it with no caps n txtspeak, and when he was done he went back through it so it would have proper sentences...
It was flabbergasting..
If you want something to be clear you need to take time to re-read and revise it. If you really want to be sure there needs to be a full day between writing and revision (otherwise you will read what you meant to write, not what you actually wrote). For a presumably non-native speaker I expect he needed that extra effort.
Technically I should wait a day to hey the reply button here. I don't see anything wrong with this post now, but it is a reasonable bet that there is something that someone else sees.
>wait a day to hey the reply button here.
Haha, yeah. I was face palming some obvious typos in an important email earlier. Even after reading it four times. I find this helps in writing music as well. I come back a day later and so many things stick out that my brain would just gloss over.
> It's hard to take your argument of "removing capitalization has made my writing better" seriously when your comment history shows that you do capitalize your written text.
right, because i couldn't have adopted this writing style in the past few weeks.
to address your second point, i could probably make better use of punctuation, but the original message is still delivered without all the fluff IMO.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
Ignorance of why something exists is not a good enough reason to destroy it.
Never heard of this before, but it’s great. Pretty succinct explanation of why effective reform is hard the likes of DOGE is counterproductive.
Yes... though I think Chesterton's fence definitely belongs in the "technically correct advice that actually does more harm than good" bucket, like "premature optimisation", "if it works don't fix it", the Unix philosophy and so on.
This doesn't apply to capitalisation, but generally especially in computing if there's something that looks useless you should remove it. If it breaks the fault lies with whomever left something useless there without a note to explain it.
The current project I'm working on has about 3 copies of every component because nobody bothers to clear up after themselves - dead code isn't doing any harm and it's better to leave it in case it's needed right?
Well sure, if you want me to work about 3x slower than I otherwise could. Not an exaggeration.
> If it breaks the fault lies with whomever left something useless there without a note to explain it.
The client won’t care, it’s your company who broke their system.
THIS IS WHY WE SHOULD GO BACK TO ALL CAPS SO WE HAVE LESS SYMBOLS TO WORRY AVOUT MAYBE GO BACK TO IGNORE DIACRITICS CUZ THEY ARE WIRD
IT IS THE WAY OF OUR FOUNCERS
totally missed the point, but you do you.
> _capitalization_ is one of those "arbitrary rules"
If you're going to qualify capitalization as an arbitrary rule, then it wouldn't matter if it's all lowercase or all uppercase. It's not a whim of scholars, it improves readability, it emphasizes, it carries meaning.
All uppercase looks loud today, but early computers were also all uppercase and it was normal. All lowercase looks bland and sloppy, only a few steps removed from "what u doing lol?" texting shorthand.
My personal take is that it's easier for me to read your sentences if you help me see where they begin and end and this is part of capitalization's value. So at least for me your goal of putting ideas in my mind may be a little less effective
If you care about communicating an idea or concept effectively, things like capitalization and grammar are absolutely important.
Wong