An anonymous poll about language

[noracharles]

Poll #5706

This poll is anonymous.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 31

Ableist or ablist?

View Answers

I spell the word as "ableist"
28 (90.3%)

I spell the word as "ablist"
2 (6.5%)

The proper spelling is "ableist"
8 (25.8%)

The proper spelling is "ablist"
2 (6.5%)

I don't believe in "proper" spelling
4 (12.9%)

The word has three syllables when I say it
24 (77.4%)

The word has two syllables when I say it
5 (16.1%)

I care how people spell the word, because spelling it wrong is a sign of a dismissive attitude
2 (6.5%)

I care how people spell the word, because it trips up my reading when it's spelled in an unexpected way
12 (38.7%)

Comments

[ineptshieldmaid]

I care about spelling because I like things to be RIGHT, dammit. But this is one of those words which is new enough that I haven't got a set "rightness" idea about it.

I do note that the Oxford English Dictionary gives "ableist" as the headword (and ablist as a variant form). And, huh, citations going back to 1981. Not so old then.

I would also say ageist instead of agist, for the logical reason that the latter looks like something you with horses. So at least I'm consistent?

[ineptshieldmaid]

Also, one reason why I have a sense of 'rightness' but I couldn't actually say that it trips up my reading is that most of the internet is spelled in 'wrong' ways, as far as I'm concerned. Yay, US spellings, not. If it's comprehensible and in use by a group of people, I can't tell without looking something up if it's a common mistake or if it's a regional variation in action somewhere.

[noracharles]

I like things to be right too. Standardized spelling is practical for so many reasons!

On the other hand, my reading comfort aside, I don't feel like we have any moral obligation to spell words a certain way. Some alternative spellings just make sense. I mean, donut? Who can hate donut?

I pronounce ableist in three syllables, or maybe two and a half with a syllabified l, and I suspected that maybe the people who have a preference for "ablist" don't? That would make their alternative spelling make sense to me, and, I admit, it would soothe me.

*Agist looks like it would be pronounced "a 'jist" to me. So the e definitely has a function there, as I read it.

[ineptshieldmaid]

Donut is a very sensible word. I take a perverse pleasure in 'doughnut', though, because it *isn't* sensible and... well, I'm Australian but I set my computer to English (UK). I am a spelling snob with very few exceptions. Jail is one of my favourite exceptions, thank you whichever American decided to scrap 'gaol', it was a silly word. And verandah, oddly enough. I cling to that particular antipodean variant very strongly.

I pronounce ableist with two syllables, but I don't pronounce it very often, so that could just be me. It's certainly true of Australian dialects that if we CAN drop out a phoneme we will, but I'd have to check that with some Australians who talk about ableism more often than I.

Agist is actually a word distinct from ageist! It's almost never found in that form, but 'agistment' is... a thing you do if you have a horse and don't have space to keep it- , you pay someone who has a paddock. Possibly they feed the horse for you as well as let it stay in their paddock? I'm not sure. All I know is there are horses on agistment up the road from my parents, I've heard people say "we're agisting the horses", so the verb *agist* ought to exist.

[noracharles]

Oh, so that's why agist reminds you of horses! I have never, ever read the word "agistment" before today, I don't think.

I agree with you about "jail". "Gaol" confuses me, I often have to stop and think before I remember what it is. On the other hand, "thru" took me a while to get used to.

I was also not aware of veranda with an h! How amusing.

[naraht]

I can't stand "ableist," though I know it's more common. And it does trip me up.

I'll become reconciled to it the day that people start writing "raceist."

[noracharles]

Haha, so others have said. To me "racist" makes sense, because the i changes the c pronounciation, so the e isn't needed, where I actually pronounce the e in ableist. But I'm slowly convincing myself to ignore the different spellings, the way I ignore so many other spelling variations :-)

[facetofcathy]

I care about how people spell it because I'm a very poor speller, and the more times I see it spelled differently, the more likely I am to get messed up. Which makes me wonder-does intent matter in spelling?

[noracharles]

I've noticed that too. I'm very much a word-outline speller rather than a phonic speller, and after reading primarily amateur authored texts on the internet rather than copy-edited printed books for years my spelling has really suffered. And having a spell-checker has conditioned me to pay less attention to what I'm doing too.

The argument that misspellings are a sign of disrespect for the reader or the group referred to upsets me. We're all conditioned by repeated exposure and may pick up an "offensive" spelling unconsciously, many of us are not strong spellers, and many of us do not have a geographically and socially concentrated reference group speaking the language we're communicating in.

I try to communicate as consistently as possible in something resembling Standard American, but I live in Denmark, I speak English with people from all over the world, and I consume English-language media from all over the world, so I will get cultural connotations wrong.

I'd say intent matters as much or as little in spelling as in other language use, so not at all in evaluating hurt caused and a lot in evaluating whether to remain friends with a person, but I'm going to assume no ill intent.

When someone is being ableist, I dare say you can tell in other, more immediately relevant ways than how they spell ableist/ablist.

[facetofcathy]

I agree with you absolutely. My problem with spelling and usage is the conundrum of not knowing that you don't know or, you can't look up every word. I also do the read the shape of the word thing and make a lot of homonym errors and double letter errors. I get really tired of people thinking that means I'm stupid.

I do understand that in some cases the rest of the content of someones post can lead you to think that their usage is intentionally offensive. A few minutes on fail fandom anon will show you a lot of examples of intentionally offensive usage as part of a performance of "edginess".

I try to remember that not everyone is USian or American in a conversation, but there are times you just have to pick a word. The racefail page on Fanlore is a mess of POC, non-white, and combinations of both and it needs some sort of uniformity. (This is mostly my doing, as it happens.) Still don't know how to go about fixing it.

[noracharles]

Oh yes, damn homophones. In elementary school I had a teacher force me to read using an "inner voice" sounding out the words, because he was convinced I would need that later in life and because lots of words I had no idea how to pronounce. I've often wished I hadn't given in to him, and I blame all my homophone errors on him ;-)

Don't know who to blame for the double letter errors, though. It's endlessly confusing when UK English and US English don't agree on single or double consonants, and then there's interference from Danish too.

I have a hard time understanding how anyone could think you were stupid. But yeah, dyslexic friends have told me they get that a lot. I tend to think people who look more at spelling than the ideas expressed in a text are not the brightest.

It's true about the edgy deliberately offensive misspellings. People do do that, and I'm not going to tell anyone not to be hurt by instances that fit that pattern.

I'm grateful and impressed that you do so much to improve fanlore! As you say, sometimes you just have to pick a word.

[kaz]

I care about correct spelling quite a bit, because wrong spelling influences my perception of the text (er, this is probably not making sense - ex in fiction, if you don't capitalise a character's name in my head they turn chibi, if you spell their name wrong they gain extra limbs and start looking a bit melted, if you don't punctuate dialogue correctly I "hear" it in robotic monotone, so on. I used to think this was normal but most people seem to experience misspellings differently, idk. Anyway, it makes it pretty impossible to take a badly-spelled piece seriously.) THAT SAID, although I prefer "ableist" myself I figure it's a new word and "ablist" is an acceptable variant. *shrugs* And yeah, syllabic l here.

[noracharles]

Very interesting!

Misspellings can make the words themselves appear off to me because they're the wrong color - though not so much anymore as when I was little, again because of that same teacher who pressured me into developing an inner reading voice. (It creepes me out a bit how much the way my brain works has been influenced by other people.)

It makes sense what you say, that the changing appearance of the words would also change the way you picture the concepts they represent. I don't experience that to such a degree as you do, but if most people didn't experience it at least a bit I doubt advertisers would put so much work into how they spell and print product names.

[codeman38]

Incidentally, from a purely descriptivist view, "ableist" has significantly more usage in print than "ablist". At least if Google Books' corpus is to be believed, anyway.

[noracharles]

Yes. It's probably the clear dominance of "ableist" which makes using "ablist" seem like a deliberate slight to some.