I’ll never forget the moment. Holding my first published book, freshly printed, heart full, fingers trembling… and there it was. “Grater.” Not greater. Grater, like the cheese kind. My debut, and suddenly, my credibility was full of holes.
My friend Rob Lowe put it best in a tweet that went viral (and viral for a reason):
“The best way to find typos in your work is to carefully and meticulously proofread it, publish it for public consumption, and then casually glance at a random page two weeks later.”
Been there. Still there. Typos have a nasty habit of hiding in plain sight until the ink is dry and the humiliation is irreversible.
Just this week, the Guardian ran a headline on US immigration policy that read: “US says Haitians can b deported.” B. Just b. You’d expect this from a teenager texting on 2% battery, not one of the world’s most respected newspapers. But the Guardian has long had a reputation for its bloopers. So much so that Private Eye affectionately dubbed it “The Grauniad” decades ago. The name stuck, because readers understood that even the pros mess up. And when they do, it’s often in full view of thousands, even millions.
So, what’s changed?
Plenty. Spelling has gone feral. Digital spaces invite informality, and informal writing—texts, tweets, memes—willingly discards capital letters, ignores apostrophes, and plays fast and loose with homophones. Caroline Tagg and others have pointed out that writing these days bears much closer resemblance to spoken language. Online, we’re not wrong; we’re expressive.
Online, Spelling: Wrong or Expressive?
There’s a kind of orthographic punk happening online. Misspellings and typos aren’t always signs of carelessness. Sometimes they’re performative—tools of irony, playfulness, or identity. As Zoriana Kunch and colleagues show in their 2022 study, spelling norms don’t hold equal weight across all communicative situations. In formal writing, spelling mistakes damage credibility. In online communication, they’re often the point.
Then we have intentional errors. “PWNED.” “Teh.” “I can haz cheezburger?” New intentional misspellings that have given birth to slang coinages. They’re memetic spells which carry tone, subculture, and affect. What looks like a typo to a proofreader is actually prosody in disguise. Funnily enough, when I type Grauniad into my word processor, no red-line indicates it as a misspelling, I guess it’s a canonical word now.
It is a common misconception to assume that writing lacks tone. “You can’t raise an eyebrow in Times New Roman” – perhaps not as true now as we once thought. In memes, the choice of Comic Sans has connotations of cheesiness (isn’t cheese grate [sic]). So we abuse the keyboard to mimic spoken language. We stretch words (“nooooo”), switch caSe to Show SarCasM (“YoU dOn’t SaY”), or ditch vowels entirely for that lean, nihilistic vibe (“pls stp”). These patterns are prosodic. They encode timing, sarcasm, volume, irony. They’re the linguistic version of side-eye.
Prosody, once the domain of speech, now exists in glitched-out fonts, broken grammar, and the deliberate mutation of spelling. In fact, it’s precisely because the written form lacks vocal nuance that we’ve invented these digital workarounds. Online, we spell badly to communicate better.
The Rise and Fall of Grammar Nazis
Of course, there’s always someone in the replies:
“Your credibility is at stake. Learn to spell.”
Hail, the Grammar Nazi. A noble defender of there/their/they’re… who completely misses the point. In informal spaces, the tyranny of “correctness” often just signals gatekeeping. As digital linguists point out, the insistence on standard spelling is more about power than clarity. If someone types “your amazing” under your poem, you know what they mean. The correction adds nothing but smugness.
Even in academia, typos are not the apocalypse they’re made out to be. As Kyle Siler’s paper on publishing metadata errors reveals, mistakes in institutional names or author affiliations may be symptoms of deeper systemic issues—outsourcing, burnout, English usage—not carelessness or stupidity. Typos are human. And being human is not, contrary to popular belief, a disqualification from scholarship. My Grate example is a good example of this actually, as that book was professionally proofread and my publisher no-doubt paid a lot for the service.
Broken Spelling, Broken Systems
Something new is happening now. Students—tech-savvy, platform-fluid, and increasingly AI-literate—are deliberately inserting typos into their essays. Why? To avoid suspicion that they’ve used ChatGPT.
And it works. Because polished prose is now suspect. If it reads too smoothly, too grammatically, too un-humanly human, it raises flags. So they add a few awkward phrases, a missed comma, a random homophone swap. This is the new camouflage. A new kind of orthographic theatre—pretending to be less capable than you are in order to appear more authentic.
Fair play, I say. It’s rather poetic. Teachers have been picking students up on minutiae and correctness, claiming it to be as vital as their original content. Now, they have to fake it or we don’t believe their authorship. That’s some meta-level irony.
Meanwhile, when I write something on the whiteboard during class and spell it wrong (which I frequently do), I tell my students:
“Blame Bill Gates. He corrected all my spelling growing up.”
It’s a dad joke. They don’t get it. They shouldn’t try to.
In Japan, where I teach, the same digital drift is happening—but with Kanji. My students can still read complex characters just fine, but there has been a well-established trend of literate adults unable to write by hand. Predictive text has replaced muscle memory. Stroke order is abstract history. The brain used to remember; now the phone does, something I termed as Exomemory in my 2019 book, Augmented Communication. Don’t worry, that’s not the one with all the “grate” typos.
So yes, spelling matters. Until it doesn’t. Typos will always sting—especially when they’re your own. But in a world where machines write flawlessly, maybe a little imperfection is the last sign that something was truly human. So, I say to The Grauniad, just let it b. Typos are a kind of linguistic entropy. Annoying, yes. But sometimes charming. Occasionally revealing. And, in the long run, not that big a deal.
Unless it’s your first book. Then it’s soul-crushing.
Read more: The Grater Error: Typos, Prosody, and The GrauniadSources & Further Reading
The Grauniad: A Typo Becomes a Legacy
The nickname “The Grauniad” famously comes from Private Eye‘s long-running mockery of the Guardian newspaper’s early days of frequent spelling errors. Far from just trolling, it’s become a cultural marker of our tolerance (and sometimes affection) for editorial imperfection.
Read more at Word Histories
Reconceptualising Authenticity in Language Teaching and Learning – R. Pinner, 2016
This was my first book—yes, the one where “grater” made its rogue appearance. Despite the typo, it’s a serious deep-dive into how we experience authenticity in language education, and how it gets tangled with identity, motivation, and context.
Published by Multilingual Matters.
Augmented Communication: Contextualising Digital Language Practices – R. Pinner, 2019
This one looks at how we talk with (and through) our devices, exploring how digital tools shape the very way we think and communicate. Includes case studies on predictive text, emoji grammar, and even AI-mediated discourse.
Published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Exploring Digital Communication – Caroline Tagg
A fantastic overview of how online communication really works—from intentional typos and emoji-as-prosody to the messy creativity of internet language. Accessible, insightful, and deeply relevant.
Routledge, 2015.
The Peculiarities of Spelling Rules in Formal, Informal Handwriting and Internet Communication – Kunch et al. (2022)
This Ukrainian study compares how spelling is perceived and used across formal, informal, and online spaces. Spoiler: young people bend the rules differently depending on context, and the internet is basically a spelling sandbox.
Presented at COLINS-2022.
Typos, Misspellings and Other Accidents: Metadata Accuracy as a Measure of Publisher Quality – Siler & Larivière (2022)
A deep but entertaining academic look at how typos—especially in metadata—can reveal systemic issues in scholarly publishing. It even touches on how digital labor, outsourcing, and linguistic privilege play a role.
Available on SocArXiv.
[i] Note, by the time I wrote this article, they had fixed the typo. My calculations put the publishing late at night Friday and the correction early morning Saturday UK time. Just shows the power of a good night’s sleep, or the truth of my friend Rob’s observation.