Too right to write

[-]Measure4y90

Maybe this is just typical-minding, but I would guess that the median person might struggle to say which of faze/phase to put in their own writing but would happily go along with whichever one they encounter on an official-looking website without a second thought.

[-]Kenoubi4y20

Yeah, I'd be pretty surprised if there's any demographic slice who actually demand "phase" when "faze" is correct. The correlation between "bothers to have an opinion on correctness of others' writing" and "knows what the correct answer actually is" seems too high.

It's a little unfortunate, because I do think there might be an important point here, but the OP's choice of example makes it harder for me to see. (Of course, it's possible I'm just wrong, which would be interesting in its own right.)

[-]Solenoid_Entity4y10

The correlation between "bothers to have an opinion on correctness of others' writing" and "knows what the correct answer actually is" seems too high.
(Edit: I'm reading between the lines and assuming you're saying you think the cohort of people who actually care enough about faze/phase to be judgemental about it, but don't themselves know the correct spelling is 'faze', is small.)

This is very interesting. I certainly agree this is our point of difference – I think there's a big cohort out there with strong, judgey opinions about 'correctness' and an active interest in spelling and grammar as a way of displaying status. These people also happen to very frequently be wrong.

But this might well me me typical minding and I'll try to think about this group more rigorously in my next post about this.

[-]Samuel Hapák4y60

I am not a native speaker. Funnily, I don't do the kind of mistakes you mention, there are other much more counterintuitive aspects of the language for me:

Capitalisation. That the century should be lowercase is obvious, but why is "English language" with the capital E? And why March with the capital M? Those are not proper nouns either.
Commas. I would expect more people to have a problem with commas than with a phenomenon vs phenomena.
Articles. I can never decide whether to put an article there or not.

[-]tslarm4y10

Articles. I can never decide whether to put an article there or not.

Do you have some examples of sentences where this is particularly tricky? (I'm just asking out of curiosity -- I'm a monolingual English speaker who never really studied the language explicitly, so the non-native perspective can be an interesting prompt to think about the rules that seem intuitive but are often pretty weird and complicated when you think about them.)

[-]Samuel Hapák4y30

Few quick examples:

Why is it “out of curiosity” and not “out of the curiosity”?

Why “see in context” and not “see in the context”? (See the button below this form)

Why “hide previous comment” and not “hide the previous comment”? (See the button above this form)

[-]Ansel4y40

These are just one native speaker's impressions, so take them with a grain of salt.

Your first two examples, to me, scan as being about abstract concepts; respectively: the emotion/quality of curiosity and the property of being in context.

This quora result indicates that it's a quality of "definiteness" that indicates when articles get dropped (maybe as a second language learner you're likely to already have this as knowledge, but find it difficult to intuit).

In those examples, the meaning doesn't rely on pointing at two specific "curiosity" and "context" objects that have to be precisely designated, it relies on set phrases "out of curiosity" and "in context" that respectively describe an unmentioned action or object.

I think the article in the last example is dropped for a completely different reason. The "definiteness" argument doesn't apply, but my instinct is that this is simple terseness in the communication from UI to user. Describing every UI element with precise language would result in web pages that resemble legal documents.

[-]Richard_Kennaway4y*30

There are no real answers to these. Explanations for linguistic rules are no more than ways of remembering them. Different languages, even when the same concepts apply to them, have different rules about them. For example, "Curiosity killed the cat" vs. "La curiosité a tué le chat." French uses the definite article more than English does. Why? It just does. Russian doesn't have articles at all. In fact, over- or under-use of "the" is one of the main signs that tells me that the writer is a foreigner.

English treats month and day names as proper nouns, so capitalises them; French does not, while German capitalises everything. Go back a few centuries and English capitalised every important noun, and the really important ones would get caps and small caps.

[-]samshap4y20

Articles are hard! I was lucky enough to be raised bilingual, so I'm somewhat adept at navigating between different article schemes). I won't claim these are hard and fast rules in English, but:

1 - 'Curiosity' is an abstract noun (e.g. liberty, anger, parsimony). These generally don't have articles, unless you need some reason to distinguish between subcategories (e.g. 'the liberty of the yard' vs. 'the liberty of the French')

2 - 'Context' can refer to either a specific context (e.g. 'see in the proper context'), in which case the articles are included, or the broad category (e.g. 'context is everything'). 'see in the context' is not ungrammatical, but its usually awkward, because without an adjective its unclear which context you are talking about. (And if you were referring to one that was previously established, you would use 'that context' or 'this context'). However, in the particular case of the button, 'see in the context' would be acceptable, because the identity of 'the context' is clear! I doubt a native English speaker would say that, though, because its not idiomatic.

3 - 'hide the previous comment' is actually correct here! However, in human-machine interfaces, articles, prepositions, and pronouns are often omitted to save space/mental effort.

[-]Solenoid_Entity4y10

Just pitching in on the last two: there's an abbreviated register of speech in English called 'note-taking register' that has crept its way into a lot of parts of speech and writing, including website navigation. Dropping the definite article (or most articles in general) is a core part of that register.

Note taking = abbreviated English register. Has crept into parts of speech, writing inc. website nav. Dropping definite article core part of register.

I suspect dropping the definite article in 'refresh page' is not related to definiteness, it's a linguistic tendency towards abbreviation. Funnily enough, it's a trait shared by the stereotypical 'robot voice', as well as 'baby voice' and some others.

[-]tslarm4y10

Americans often pronounce 'phenomena' and 'phenomenon' almost exactly the same way! The last two letters are just a flat mute sound.

Is this definitely true? I think the last vowel sound is the same for both forms (in American, British, and my own Australian English), but I thought people usually hit the 'n' of phenomenon enough to distinguish it from the plural.

I certainly do notice the phenomenon/phenomena mistake a lot, though almost always it's people using 'phenomena' as the singular, rather than vice versa. It seems to happen in both print and speech, though if you're right about the American pronunciations, maybe I'm sometimes just mishearing. Anyway, until now my best guess was that maybe 'phenomena' intuitively seems singular to some people because the ending sounds like the singular article 'a'.

[-]AprilSR4y10

I think it's mostly that people don't hear the "n" at the end, so they end up under the impression that "phenomena" is both the singular and the plural form.

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

28

28

28

you sure were staying in faze with our readers?

bigbears

cent u ryd?

Just try to find your people