Choose A Side: Twitter Police Or Reckless Typists

There is a line drawn in the digital sand. On one side, people who are driven crazy by typos and misspellings in casual communications. On the other, people who don't give a shit.

The Times profiles vigilante grammarians online today. They beat up on John Cusack for typos. John CUsack! I'm not going to correct that typo, just to fuck with them.

Here is a 28-year-old guy who built an algorithm to alert people that using caps lock is annoying, because

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"It would be kind of nice if people cleaned up their grammar a little bit and typed in lowercase, and made the Internet a little bit smarter."...So far, he has issued more than 130,000 of these helpful reminders, including at least 205 to one particular user, a woman in Singapore. (Oddly, with little effect.)

As someone who produces relatively vast amounts of online content for a living, with overworked editors and lacking any sort of copy editor, I am sympathetic to anyone who wants to smack the typo police. I consider this, however, distinct from people who willfully use caps lock (see Kirstie Alley, above), and people who know better but use bad grammar anyway. Both of whom I judge. What side was I on again? On which side was I? Fuck.

On The Twitter Patrol [NYT]

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