Well, it’s part (a large part) of the reason we’re in trouble. The following is a partial response to a tech site article, written by a professional “reporter” of tech news, if you can believe it. No, I won’t link it. The parts I don’t point out are as badly-written (or worse) and would only serve to improperly influence anyone not as thoroughly inoculated against linguistic drivel as I seem to be.
“At the time there were many different OS’s [sic] on the market…”
Good Godfrey! Is there no editorial staff? No proofreading? No literate person to put an end to atrocities like this? An apostrophe IS NOT USED TO FORM A PLURAL!
Apparently, there are no literate gatekeepers between writers and publishing; witness, earlier:
“Common users also were quite skeptical to [sic] this new fancy gadget called a ‘Mouse’.”
Not “to” but “about”. Learn the meanings of words!
And,
“IBM they [sic] named it PC-DOS and it quickly became a popular and widespread system.”
WTF?!?
And, “While back in their ‘lab’ secretly developing their new battleship, that would grow to conquer the world.”
sic-sic-sic-sic-sic-sic-SICK!
Sentence, please! Make a sentence! And what’s with the quotation marks around “lab”? And the comma between “battleship” and “that”? It’s just plain stupid, quite apart from being completely, totally and absolutely uncalled for.
And the hits just keep on (and keep on) coming:
“Windows 1.0: changing computers for ever…”
No! No! No! Not “for ever” but “forever”–ONE WORD.
How about,
“Windows 1, [sic] was not the first of its kind but it introduced several improvements, among others were [sic] multi-tasking.”
Dude! Lose the extraneous, meaningless, WRONGLY PLACED commas! They only serve to make you look stupid. And it just makes me sick to read the rest of the sentence. I gag just contemplating that abortion.
The whole thing continues with one egregiously stupid comma, subject-verb disagreement and word mis-usage after another. *gag* And the guy actually does this for his day job.
Thief.
And unwitting subliterate products of “public education” (AKA “prisons for kids” and “remedial failure academies for young adults”) will read this dreck and have their subliterate ignorance reinforced. It’s evil, I say, just evil.