It bothers me, but it doesn’t amaze me any more. A few years ago it did, but since then I have spent a lot of time on sites like this one that draw contributions from a very wide spectrum of the population, and my amazement threshold has gone way up.
I have a theory that inability to distinguish between or among such simple words such as
you’re and your
they’re, their, and there
here and hear
it’s and its
and even to and too (which I thought we ought to have mastered in second grade)
not to mention the sheer incomprehension behind such disastrous formulations as “Wallah!” and “ordurbs” is the result of hearing them spoken, as on TV or in films, and never seeing them written down. If they’re clear enough when you hear them, why isn’t a homophone—or, failing that, a phonetic approximation—good enough?
I would have thought that the upsurge in written communications, with e-mail, e-lists, and texting, would have brought about a heightened interest in mastery of written language. But instead, helped along in no small degree by the perversions of advertising (“E-Z,” “4U,” “lite”), it has spawned a strange new written medium consisting of fractured words and quasi-pictures that will probably provide topics for scores of Ph.D. theses a couple of centuries from now. I wonder what language those will be written in.