The spelling police and the only divide between people that actually. matters

Here’s a surreal one for the annals of social media logs. A heated discussion recently broke out in a Facebook group called Blind Penpals about typos and spelling errors in posts and the ethics of calling people out over them.

I joined this group some years ago as a way to support a social media acquaintance from Macedonia who reached out to me. She’s blind and she started this group to get more social interaction in her life. I didn’t feel the need to ask why she was isolated. Blind and visually impaired people are so often dismissed and forgotten (at best) no matter what country they live in.

The group was only a handful of people and she needed numbers to get it going. I had kids with intense needs and jobs and urban homesteading, the works. I didn’t have enough local community acceptance and still don’t, but I have never lacked for online connections and I didn’t really want a penpal. But I have enjoyed the occasional perspective from other blind and visually impaired people around the world.

Image via PIxabay

Thanks to the handful of Eastern Europeans who jumped in and spurred Facebook algorithms to put the group in search results, it now has 7,300 members. It’s an English-speaking group so most of those are people in the English-speaking, privileged West of the world. And thus the discussion about typos and spelling.

As my readers know, I’m a professional writer, but that doesn’t mean I never make spelling mistakes or typos. Part of this is just that I type fast and often have a kid or two yelling at me while I edit my posts. The other part is a consequence of being visually impaired.

First, I rarely read print. It is laborious, painful and slow for me to read even if the print is large. I have read out loud to my kids for eleven years because a parent reading, both the actual warm body and the warm, imperfect voice, have amazing scientifically demonstrated benefits for children, especially children who spent the first months of their lives in cold institutions without these things. But it’s a labor of love. It’s hard and I wouldn’t do it for anything less vital.

For everything else, I listen—to audiobooks, to podcasts, to text-to-speech articles, to audio descriptions of TV shows, even to voiceover on my phone.

As a result, I don’t see words over and over again like most people in today’s world. I don’t have the reinforcement of spelling and didn’t have it as a child. I routinely encounter words I want to include in a blog post that I am pretty sure I have never seen in print before. When I realize this consciously, I look them up.

But a lot of the time I don’t slow down enough to notice and I spell the way I spell. If the word is a homophone, the spellcheck doesn’t even catch it. And at other times my spelling guesses are so far off I can’t find the correct spelling even if I search online. If you’ve been reading my blogs for a while, you’ll know what I mean.

But social media is much worse than blogs. When I blog, I write in relatively quiet moments and I go through and edit at least two or three times on each post. I post only every two weeks, so I have time to do that.

But social media is an ongoing conversation. It IS my social interaction and it is that for a lot of others during the pandemic and for a lot of people with disabilities even when there isn’t a pandemic. It’s like talking to people. I do it while I’m cooking dinner, fielding kids, digging up the garden, taking a five minute break from a translating job or standing in an elevator to the doctor’s office.

I can’t see much at all on the tiny screen of a phone and I use the accessibility settings to the hilt. I dictate nearly everything into my phone and I play back what I wrote, if there’s time. There often isn’t. When you speak into a speech-recognition app, there are going to be mistakes. I’ve gotten pretty good at using the technology. I know how to enunciate to increase my chances, but errors are still going to come up.

All this applies to most of the other blind and visually impaired people in the Blind Penpals group, except many of them learned English as a second language, have less residual sight than I have, have cheaper technology or have less education. Blind people never were very good with spelling and modern speech recognition technology may have made written communication a lot faster and easier for us but it generally increased the level of errors at the same time. I wasn’t the target of the shaming this time because I was one of the better spellers in the group, but the virtual heckling of others really got under my skin.

Last year, I was harried out of the local branch of Extinction Rebellion in no small part because of my error-ridden dictated messages in the group’s coordination system. No one ever said any of my messages were actually incomprehensible, but I had several major coordinating roles and I had to do a lot of messaging back and forth with volunteers.

I want to make clear here that Extinction Rebellion is an awesome movement and most of the volunteers are the best people in the world, who made me a cake to thank me for being their coordinator and were truly appreciative and cared not one iota about typos.

But there were a few people, particularly a coordinator who came from a more privileged background than most in the group, who couldn’t stand my errors or the way my messages sounded like someone speaking, rather than the clipped abbreviations which she preferred. After months of conflict over this issue and being banned from various activities she was overseeing, I left the group entirely to preserve my health and give my family some much needed TLC.

If I’d been younger, feistier and childless I probably would have stayed and fought for inclusion and maybe saved that XR branch from the disintegration that soon followed my exit. But my kids were in crisis, my health was suffering and the attacks were giving me PTSD flashbacks from much worse social ostracism in my childhood. I chose to heal and live to fight another day. But I did take a lot of lessons with me from that experience.

One of them was that even in the best circles, there are people who snap or peck at other people for reasons that A. don’t really matter and B. are beyond the personal control of the person being attacked. It’s the root of racism, ableism and pretty much all other evil as far as I’ve ever seen.

It isn’t the differences that hurt us. It’s the intolerance of difference.

Even in current American politics, it isn’t the fact that people disagree about the best ways to counter a pandemic. It’s the hatred of those who have different opinions that is breaking families, friendships and efforts to protect the vulnerable.

Willful endangerment by hugging people in large gatherings and refusing to wear a mask in crowded places isn’t about an opinion. It’s about denigrating and antagonizing those who have different circumstances and greater concern. On the other side of the political divide, shunning and shaming anyone who asks questions or mentions new information is another manifestation of the “us versus them” paradigm..

I don’t always enter the fray on social media. After I was hounded out of the local Extinction Rebellion group, I took a nine-month break from social media and had a lot fewer arguments in general. But I also became a lot more isolated. So, I’m back now and I pick my battles, but I do choose to occasionally stand up to those pouring shame on someone while they’re down.

The recent spat over typos and spelling errors on Blind Penpals was one such instance. There were several male members with English-sounding names who repeatedly posted about the high level of English grammar and spelling in mistakes in the group. They were from what I could access on their profiles all coming from fairly privileged situations. I don’t know whether they were actually blind and visually impaired as well, but they were westerners, native English speakers, and mostly men. Their style of posting showed that they had a lot of time to devote to social media and they didn’t have a lot of survival-level pressures in their lives.

I posted a brief reply on the first post informing the person offended by the errors that many in the group are non-native English speakers, and because it is a group of blind people, many also use imperfect voice recognition technology. I fully expected that to be the end of the discussion. Instead several others piled on and there were more posts harassing and shaming members whose posts were not perfect.

What I came to in the end of that discussion is worth repeating:

“The issue is not that person A has an opinion and person B has an opinion and they are different. The issue is that person A has an opinion denigrating person B and feels empowered to share it widely and publicly and person B wants to be left alone and not harassed. It is time the world woke up to this thing.

I don’t care if your opinion is different from mine as long as your opinion has no bearing on anyone but yourself. If you are troubled by someone’s imperfect typing or dictating, someone’s skin color, someone’s accent, someone’s religion, someone’s sexual orientation, someone’s gender identity or lack there of, someone’s disability or body shape, go cry into a pillow.

Expressing a negative opinion about other people is pretty much the root of all the evil in the world. There are acts of nature that hurt us, but they aren’t evil. Even Covid is just a life form, living and procreating. Evil comes in when a thinking entity denigrates another, not in defense, but just because the other makes them feel uncomfortable or requires them to exercise patience, tolerance or self-discipline.

The old saying is true after all. There are only two kinds of people in the world. There is one important divide and that is between people who attack others simply for being different, uncomfortable or inconvenient or allow others to do so without challenge and people who defend against such attacks and insist on inclusion. It’s the only divide that actually matters.”

I know typos actually do sometimes cause confusion or real problems. I also know some people really want to learn to use language better. I have spent the past fifteen years teaching writing craft and English as a second language. I spend all day essentially criticizing other people’s grammar or writing and helping them make it better.

But they asked me to do it and I never shame them. I have students who make the same mistake literally hundreds of times. But they are all doing the best they can. Bad grammar or bad spelling is never simply a matter of laziness. It is often a matter of being too stressed, rushing to much, difficulty focusing and all kinds of other things.

The problems that matter are the problems caused denigrating a person or a group of people. In this world, just about everything boils down to that.

The catch is that we aren't all permanently on one side or the other of that divide. I am dismayed when people I respect fall into the trap of shaming others or judging others without having all the information. It is crucial to keep this divide in mind. It doesn’t mean never criticizing. But it does mean paying attention to whether or not the person criticized had a real choice in their situation. And it means regularly checking your own confirmation bias.

The definition of happiness

People have sought to nail down happiness for millennia. It is an overall positive concept. We can say that love can be smothering or that joy can be overwrought. Almost anything positive can have a negative side but the only possible negative thing about happiness is when it is not shared.

I cannot claim that I have found happiness or that my life is happy or that I have the answers in any other definite way. But I have found one thing. I now know what happiness is.

Some people think happiness is simple good fortune, material wealth, good health, good family relationships, the right number and kind of friends, the things a person wants on a day to day basis. And these things do often “make us happy” at least for a moment. Conversely, the complete lack of material necessities or family or friends, great poverty or ill health can cause much sadness.

Creative Commons image via Pixabay

But I’m guessing most readers of this blog are well aware that this is not really what happiness is and that, in fact, sadness is not the opposite of happiness. We all know of people who were wealthy and terribly unhappy. There are plenty of healthy people who are unhappy and hordes of people with many friends and family members who are unhappy. It is well documented that acquiring things that you want only makes a person happy very briefly and can lead directly to more long-term unhappiness.

Looking to more complex sources of happiness is often seen as somehow morally superior, but I am not certain it isn’t just wisely self-interested.

I used to think that happiness was adventurous living and passion or attention to one’s senses and living intensely in the moment. These things come close because they hint at the real heart of happiness.

Living intensely in the moment with full sensory awareness is a good start, but what makes happiness full and lasting are two things: Purpose and thankful joy.

It takes both. Let me show you why.

Purpose or meaning in one’s day-to-day life is a key ingredient to happiness. A person can be quite content, satisfied and well-off and yet have the nagging, uncomfortable knowledge that happiness eludes them. In fact, this is a common symptom of the modern malaise known as afluenza.

In wealthy western countries, a lot of people already have the material and even emotional comforts they need and desire. And to our dismay, we have found that this does not translate into much greater happiness than our ancestors enjoyed while struggling through lives of material want.

In fact, having what one needs can be counterproductive in terms of happiness because one of the easiest purposes or meanings to find in life is the striving for the material needs of yourself and your family. If one’s family is in need, it is simple enough for the individual to attach guilt-free purpose to every activity that either directly or indirectly fills these real needs.

I have met many people in developing countries or immigrants from struggling countries who have recently arrived in a wealthy country, who are radiantly happy over the long-term. These are not the desperately poor people who have been down-trodden by systemic oppression. Sometimes they are people who have escaped such traps by good fortune or well-timed hard work. The thing that they share is driving purpose. They have a realistic and graspable possibility of giving their children opportunities they could not have dreamed of when they were younger. And the happiness of these people is so palpable that it has become legendary.

Once we have what we truly need, that easy out is no longer an option. Many people pretend that their family “needs”. a new siwimming pool or a better car or private school or other things that take large amounts of money, but our deep subconscious and—dare I say it?—our souls know it is not a real need and thus the purpose often starts to feel hollow and people who base their lives on this kind of fulfillment eventually fall into psychological crisis.

Many of the same immigrants who were so happy while pursuing the dream of security and opportunity for their children find that once it is achieved, they themselves are less happy and their children struggle with conflicted feelings and deep dissatisfaction. This is the paradox of the happiness granted by such a survival-focused purpose in life.

Many parents—and I am somewhat guilty of this myself—base our purpose in life around the nurturing and flourishing of our children. And there is nothing inherently wrong with this either. It is another relatively easy out though and for many people parenting is temporary and this basis for meaning and thus happiness leads to empty nest syndrome for many or in some cases terrible grief and depression if something happens to the child or children to make flourishing no longer possible.

Others find purpose through their work. Purposeful and meaningful work is one of the classic ways in which we find purpose and thus happiness in life. It doesn’t mean that any activity outside of work is not fulfilling. Our bodies are well aware that we need rest and recreation to fulfill our purpose well and our purpose can also be a mis between work and family fulfillment.

People who have careers with clear and highly respected purpose, such as doctors, scientists or teachers, are often happier than people in roles that may resemble cogs in a vast machine. This is not an objective thing. By objective logic, a person who works in a job of mundane maintenance in the transportation industry or state agency that oversees such an industry may well have less feeling of purpose, though in reality their job ensures that the doctors, scientists and teachers get to their jobs and that their patients and students arrive as well.

The point here is that we must have purpose and meaning of some kind in order to enjoy deep and enduring happiness. For those who lack need or don’t have anyone who physically and emotionally depends on them and also lack clearly purposeful work or who cannot find meaning in their work the struggle for happiness is hard… but certainly not impossible.

Some of the more pro-active ways to find purpose are to be a lifelong student, always pursuing knowledge, or to join communities or causes which have a purpose that is important to you. Some people can find purpose or meaning in purely spiritual matters or in living a simple life well. There is nothing wrong with this, if the feeling of meaning in it is genuine to the individual.

In any event, purpose is generally the most externally conditioned of the two ingredients of happiness. You might think the opposite was true. Doesn’t a sense of meaning or purpose come from within whereas joy is something given to you by the outside? This is in fact false.

Purpose, real purpose, is dependent on many external factors. Unless you are one of those people who can find a true and abiding purpose in spiritual existence in and of itself, any other purpose can be destroyed or at least harmed by circumstances. Just as with the parent who puts everything into the nourishing of a child who then dies, other meaningful activities can and often are thwarted in major ways.

It is, of course, possible to overcome the devastation or destruction of that which has given life purpose and meaning for a time. We find new purpose all the time and a wise person will always have more than one source of meaning in their life. But reconstructing happiness after a major blow can be hard.

Moments of thankful joy on the other hand are much more at the discretion of the the individual.

Moments of joy or beauty are truly as necessary as purpose. We have all known or at least known of people who have lived with great and grim purpose and gained no happiness from it.

Some people do manage to make wealth and prestige their entire purpose in life but without joy and gratitude, they remain almost entirely miserable. Those who must struggle to survive in extreme situations certainly find purpose or meaning in that struggle, but if starvation, hardship or persecution is too intense it may be nearly impossible for the individual to find any joy and thus happiness is out of reach.

Some of the happiest people in the world are relatively poor. Poor countries often register as happier on psychological indicators. And this has a lot to do with the fact that purpose—i.e. survival and the survival and education of one’s children—are relatively easy purposes to find for lives in these countries, and yet, as long as there is no terrible war or famine, points of joy and beauty can be found even amid relative hardship.

Among countries with the highest suicide rates—definitely an indicator of a serious lack of happiness—there are many wealthy countries and also countries in which stress and social expectations are high. In the first group purpose may be a bit harder to find, which leads some people to give up without searching further for meaning, and in the second group, while satisfying strict social norms may give a kind of purpose, it is often a hopeless one and it does not lend itself to joy or gratitude.

For this reason, the happiest people tend to be people who have not yet achieved the things they most want and yet have enough to allow for moments of beauty, enjoyment and gratitude. Despair is the result of grinding poverty or overwhelming oppression and despair is the true opposite of happiness. While it is possible to be happy, even while holding a deep sadness for the loss of or separation from home or loved ones in one’s heart,, it is not possible for happiness and despair to coexist.

Thankful joy can be found in a moment for most of us. A glance at some scrap of natural environment, a lightening or darkening sky, a familiar and loved face added to a moment of mindful appreciation is all it really takes.

Ah, that sky through the bare birch branches of early spring. Ah, the warmth of the radiator on cold knees. Ah, a cup of a warm and tasty brew. For a moment, nothing more is necessary. And if this occurs in a life with purpose and meaning, the result is. happiness.