Used to work as a substitute teacher who would get papers handed in for the regular teacher. The use of the “f” & other words like this…as well as text speak was more prevalent than you can imagine.

This is our future!!!

If I see a spelling error or typo on a printed résumé, that résumé goes immediately into the trash can.

If a person can’t pay attention to the details of a document that serves as his introduction to me, how can I expect him to pay attention to detail in his work environment?

Well, I have taught English on occasion, but currently I just teach Linguistics at my university in Mexico.

I have always been an excellent speller in English. Nowadays, I also use Spanish on a daily basis, as well as English. a little less than 20 years ago, we were in the States on a sabbatical, and I applied for a proofreading job at the local paper. They gave me a test to check if I could find the misspelled words in a document, and I only missed one, because of interference from Spanish: I missed an ‘f’ that had been substituted for a correct ‘ph’ in one word. That, out of about 50 possible errors to miss, was enough so I didn’t even get an interview for the job!

In any case, comments like ‘English is currently going to hell, as witness the younger generation …’ have been current for centuries, and even millennia (’your’ spell checker just indicated the previous word as an error, incorrectly; I guess it wants ‘millenniums’? (yep–yuck)). Anyway, we linguists, and many of us speak and write *very* ‘correctly’, nevertheless tend to be nonprescriptivist. We realize that language is constantly changing, and no amount of rearguard action will ever change *that* (pace what has actually happened over the last several hundred years with one of the few prescriptivist successes: ain’t).

Jim