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Normal, functioning people and grammar

Katt was saying the other day how Craigslist buyers with bad grammar seemed scary. (She and I are selling off a bunch of our stuff in preparation for our move.) She forwarded me an email from a guy that wanted to buy a futon, and I agreed that there was a chance that something was up with this guy. So, I went to her apartment that night to provide some robbery deterrent.

This buyer turned out to be a cheerful hipster wearing some kind of beret, with absolutely no sign of criminal intent. He was pretty far from being a scammy troglodyte.
 

I just sold a desk to a guy that sent me this email:

Hello, I’m layed off and am hoping to get a desk like this for my niece’s birthday. Would you accept $10 bucks. Please forgive if an intrusion.

This guy didn’t seem threatening (possibly a liar, though). However, I did make a bunch of assumptions about this guy:

- Probably older, maybe in his forties or fifties.
- Worked at a factory.
- Lived alone, ate a lot of frozen dinners.

Had I stopped to think about it, I probably would have realized that that last assumption was a bit over-the-top. However, they just sprang to mind without a second thought!

The guy was in his twenties or thirties, and he showed up with his girlfriend. (I’m still surprised that someone that age would think their young niece would want an old desk for a birthday present, though.)

 
Both of these guys had perfect spoken grammar, which was shocking, but really, it shouldn’t have been. I had a discussion with some friends a while ago in which I tried to make the point that terrible grammar and spelling aren’t reliable signs of very low intelligence and that most of the people that looked like troglodytes online are perfectly articulate in an oral conversation and – perhaps – smarter than you or I.

Huh, I guess I forgot all that.

Obviously, it’s not good that reasonably intelligent people aren’t learning how to write, but it is reality.

What I can’t quite figure out at the moment is why that guy that emailed Katt seemed perhaps sinister. Do I believe that dumb people are more likely (to a significant degree) to be criminals?

Well, I don’t see an idiot and think “criminal!” but I guess I do have some bias.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 12:56 am and is filed under happenings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 8 Comments

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    I've made spelling mistakes during late night messages about business transactions. Okay, I was buying makeup and shiny objects. My messages are not that bad compared to the posted one. That is some horrid grammar.

    The "I'm laid off" thing is kinda iffy. It's a little embarassing to use a personal situation to try and save a quick buck. Only my opinion. Anyway, perhaps the niece is a writer (or an avid LJer/internet user LOL )and would love a proper desk.

    Yes, I think that outside of formal business situations, some people don't care how they present themselves to the world. They may think Craigslist or the internet is informal enough that they can get away from proper grammar.
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    The woman who bought my desk was also kind of inarticulate via email, but was awesome in person. (I mean, you don't see a lot of people who actually speak like the Worst of Craigslist.) It turns out that part of her correspondence was from her cell phone.

    I think we might have been jaded by the likes of spammers and Nigerian diplomats. If something comes in that isn't articulate or missing some capitalization, we're not as likely to think it's as legit as something containing paragraphs and relevant information.

    Not to mention that when your main mode of communication/presentation is writing, good grammar and spelling are curb appeal. We don't have the person's face or tone of voice to go on, just the writing - and writing doesn't convey quite as much. It's kind of like how we assume shabbily-groomed people, not the clean and well-dressed ones, are the ones most likely to pickpocket us, when the truth is we really don't know.
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    Oh, yeah, spammers! I completely forgot about them because spam hasn't actually reached me for a while. Still, I should have remembered.
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    I think maybe poor grammar/spelling online is like going out dressed in ratty sweatpants and an ancient t-shirt with holes in it. It doesn't necessarily mean you don't know how to dress well, just that, sometimes, you just don't care how you're presenting yourself to the world. There are a lot of cases where I'm astounded by someone's apparent laziness or shoddiness in some way, but that's just my own bias, assuming that everyone would care as much as I do about that thing. But then there are so many aspects of my own life that I can't be bothered to care deeply about (see sweatpants/t-shirt above), that probably horrify those who do care!

    I do think there's some weird Internet aesthetic that's developed, that promotes deliberately bad grammar and spelling. I don't know if it maybe started with all the LOLs and BRBs from chat rooms, or from 133t-speak, but it definitely reached some kind of tipping point with LOLcat-speak, and now writing online like you have some kind of severe mental disability is the mark of being Internet savvy. I mean, people don't even write LOL anymore...it's devolved to "lawlz" and variants. Even though I find this kind of thing hilarious, it does make me wonder how far it's going to go. In five more years, are people even going to be writing in recognizable words anymore, or just weird gurgles?
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    That's a very good analogy. A lot of people do not care how they look in writing, but I do think that many of them couldn't write well if their lives depended on it.

    The people that do use words like "lawlz" and what not probably do know how to write, though. It's part of what makes it funny. Or! Maybe that's how it used to be and now it's not a funny thing at all to them!

    In five more years, are people even going to be writing in recognizable words anymore, or just weird gurgles?

    If you haven't already seen Idiocracy, you should check it out.
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    Yeah, it's amazing when seemingly intelligent people can't string together a proper sentence. Craigslist people are always off in one way or another. Take, for example, this counteroffer I got on a monitor I'm selling on CL:


    "DEPRESSED ECONOMY , IN A RECESSION 4 Yr OLD Monitor ? $100 CASH

    Now that’s not a question ! Its money in your pocket

    Rich XXX-XXX-XXXX

    I live in [redacted] but , shop is in [redacted] so coming and going … let me know !"
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    That's bizarre but consistent punctuating ! The ellispes .... everywhere seem to be pretty popular these days .

    I think Craigslist people *are* the people. The people are off. In writing, at least.
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    The space-before-punctuation trend has exploded in recent years. Where are people learning it? It doesn't appear to be correlated to people who don't speak English as a primary language.

    I'm genuinely puzzled about this.
 
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