The number of typographical howlers does seem to be growing – the Bish himself has set this ball rolling, with his tweet: “Wish I had a penny for every person who doesn't know the difference between "pour over" and "pore over"…”

Others abound: “towing the line” and “would of” being two common ones. Along with these, there are the punctuation blunders, with either not enough or too many, often randomly-scattered, commas, or spaces before – often made worse by no space after (“Here ,it can be seen.What is, the point ?”)

Call me a wittering old biddy of you will, but it was ingrained into me that spelling, grammar and punctuation were necessary to ensure that your message was transmitted without the need for interpretation, and to minimise any reading effort – “readability” is the idiom, nowadays. You only have to read Ian M. Banks’ “Feersum Enjins” to see that point (and, no, I am not sure if that (mis)spelling is correct) about ease of reading; the misspelling was deliberate and was for good reasons, but it is a good book, if hard to read.

Anyhoo… add any that you may have noticed, yourself, and don’t let me be the only one to go off on a rant.

Noone for no one.

Believes for evidence.

Climate change for global warming.

:)

I'm staying right out of this topic, except to repeat something Humphrey Littleton said. He was being interviewed and the guy said 'I hear that you're something of an orthinologist.' He didn't think of the perfect comeback for the verbal trip until he was in the car going home. 'Not so much an orthinologist, more of a word botcher.'

"How did we get 'that' for 'than' on a qwerty keyboard?"
I think a lot of apparent mistakes are due to predictive text functions where people aren't reading what comes up on the screen. I know it caught me out a lot when I first encountered the problem in a word processor. It still does, but I often spell check my comments. That, in itself, will not eliminate such spelling mistakes, but reading the comment in a different font seems to make them more visible to me.

I think spelling still makes a big difference to most readers. I will usually stop reading a comment after a third serious spelling mistake. But I confess to liking my commas.

My better half is my personal Liz Truss and has a hatred for retail signs saying things like

New seasons Apple's

Having had the difference beaten into me with the tawse the one that makes me shudder is the confusion between

There, Their and They're

But as I said on Martin A's record breaker I try to assume that it is a mistake or lack of the tawse causing the problem not something done to wind me up and try to read what was intended.

The other issue is people writing in the local vernacular, having lived in various parts of the UK there are definite non-grammatically correct phrases used in particular parts of the country. For instance in Perthshire you used to, maybe still do, hear the phrase "I seen him yesterday" or variations of it. Now is that dialect or bad English?

1860's, 1970's, 2014's etc, when it's actually meant to be a plural not a possessive.

Another Scottish dialect one which fidgets me is "The fence is needing painted"

Martin A
It's a rule written in stone - except for the exceptions? There's nothing like an exception which makes things more confusing than applying the rule.

Radical Rodent
According to QI, so it must be right, the i/e rule is incorrect if you search all words with either ie or ei

My spelling is heroically poor. I will sit as quietly as possible and seek to not draw attention to myself.
By the way, and of the BH community living in Ireland?
The lovely Mrs. Hunter and I are taking a week's vacation to Ireland next week.
We are making a self-guided trip and would love to meet fellow BH community members for an adult beverage or two at a pub if agreeable.