I know that occasionally I come off like an arrogant jerk, especially when it comes to goofs and mistakes. I never mean it that way, and certainly never with malice. I make a few goofs myself, although I do try to reduce them before I get ridiculed by other arrogant jerks. And I mean that with affection.

A Slashdot article (and the article it references) discuss a little bit about how using software is making the general populace stupid, and how frustrating it is for some of us. This caused me to consider how this affects me and those around me.

Not knowing where anything is (geographically, that is), how to spell things correctly, or how to do simple math are distinct and noticeable byproducts of our information-age overload the article mentions. As I get older, I find that I don't rely on my own memory nearly as much as I used to. Instead I find myself relying on my PDA, on-line resources, or in a pinch, on the wife (and probably her PDA or on-line resources). My phone comes with the whole Internet on it, so I don't have to remember anything as long as I have that in my pocket. But while I do rely on that information for "facts," I try not to rely on it for actual solutions.

One of my new favorite hobbies is to playfully mock grammatic errors. I try to forgive individuals in their one-off postings and messages, especially with typos and misspellings, as mistakes happen in our haste to get what's flowing through our heads at the speed of neurons, as we get fouled by the slower mechanics of our fingers. So you're off the hook if you thought I meant you.

What I really find amusing are things we see that must pass through many drafts (and presumably many hands) that are so often so wrong. The mentioned article touches on this a little, as the use of "smarter" software has softened our own abilities to notice these errors, and they make their ways to the public for our mocking and ridicule.

Billboards and posters and on-line ads are fraught with (presumably unintentional) misspellings, mis-uses, and just plain dumb mistakes. Fewer are the errors in print, but they also occur. Contractions are easy targets, as it seems too many people don't seem to be able to tell which "your" or "there" you're supposed to use in a situation. Homonyms seem to give people the most trouble after that, as our reliance on spell-checkers will allow us to pick the correctly spelled word, even though its use is completely incorrect in that instance.

I guess, in all fairness, for some of those, I do pick on individuals, but really only in cases where the foible is made on something that should not have been done hastily. For example, in one office I worked, someone had tacked a sign, that they took a little bit of time in software to create, to the outside of their cubicle, against a high-traffic walkway, that said "you're silence is appreciated." I just had to think, "I am not silence," although I did try to be respectful of the workers on the other side of the cubicle walls as I passed by. Had this been a quickly scribbled note, I would have probably ignored it, but they took the time to choose different fonts for the different words, emphasizing "you're," layout the text, and even tack on some clip-art of a cartoon-ish person making a "shush" face...too much effort to let slide as a quick "oops." I put a neatly penciled correction to the correct use of "your" on a Post-it note over the misspelled word, but it was removed, seemingly in preference to the incorrect use; perhaps they thought it was more noticeable when it was wrong.

I'm guilty of getting this kind of dumber as I get older, due to both the decay of my own facilities and my increased reliance on information accessibility. I do, however, feel I have a good foundation for filtering that accessed information (well, what hasn't decayed). And I feel self-righteous enough to amuse myself when others exhibit this frailty.