"English being my second language, I curse it everyday and wish it could be more like, say, Hungarian, in which such a thing as a spelling bee would be unthinkable."

I love this about English! We are the most prolific word thieves of all time. We even stole an entire grammatically complete sentence from French ("Je ne sais quoi").

If you want English to be more like Hungarian, start inserting Hungarian words into sentences otherwise written in English and I guarantee people will adopt them as loanwords in short order. Never define them, we'll figure it out from context and vibes, and we'll never pronounce them correctly, which might make it grating to listen to them spoken back to you. But you can absolutely just incept words into English. We'll take them. We're hoarders. We all love that shit.

My favorite thing about it is the register system that developed from all this theft. There are at least three: German, French, and Latin. German is less formal, and French and Latin are often equal but differ in that French is less bureaucratic than Latin. The start, commencement, and initiation of something are different. And an initiation is different from an inauguration. You ask your friend, question a witness, and interrogate a suspect. Greek is more abstract than Latin. A moral question is nearer to the heart than an ethical question. You diagnose a disease, you judge a person. You have compassion, you merely feel sympathy.

Though, I would hate to learn it as a second language for the exact same reasons.

Seems like something that would be well received if one and exactly one guy was doing it, and annoying as hell when 35 additional jabronis started to run the same type of script, like what you see with the oh-so-helpful AI PRs on github that make random ass changes nobody asked for.

Especially given we already have pretty good spell checkers, and have had for way over a decade.

Nice idea…but this will just end up in the same bucket as “I really like your website {domain} and especially your post {link to blog post} about {topic} would you like to include a link to {our service}” SEO link building spam.

I dliberately put speelling mistakes to confirm I am not an AI.

> Before sending the first mails, I stopped for a moment to reassess whether this was a good idea. What ultimately helped me decide was whether I would like to get the mail as an author.

The only reason this is a reasonable thing for this person to do is this:

> since I ultimately manually check every error

Imagine these emails going out automatically, and incorrectly.

Gonna get the harvard email server onto gmail's naughty list going like this!

>>The recipients of the mail campaign aren't passive in this story; on the contrary, some played a reverse card, informing of issues...

Yeah, this gets me. Grammar is grating to me and I used to call out when someone would write "Me and my friend..." only to get attacked in response as if grammar matters to no one.

Is it kind to email people telling them they wrote 'its' and not 'it's'? Thus used to be called being a grammar Nazi and is just a different kind of asshole

aaaaaaahh!, yep Ive, earned it, put my feet up for a minuit, having brought the average spelling score down single fingerdly, a job well poked, ifin I say so myself.