I saw it in a Home Depot in the US once. It was father's day and there was a sign that read, "Dad's Love Tools". Of course they meant to say, "Dads Love Tools".
I thought it was particularly funny and embarrassing for the store, but I couldn't get the clerk at the store to understand what was wrong.
> I couldn't get the clerk at the store to understand what was wrong.
Not surprising. Tons of Americans are borderline illiterate. It's one of many things that makes it annoying to live here, especially as the amount of communication done in text increases with more advents in technology.
I recall reading somewhere that the standard reading level for the states is about sixth grade, and if anything that comes across to me as slightly generous. Honestly this is one of my few hopes with the proliferation of LLM: that it will make reading communications from other workers less utterly painful.
Even among the highly educated, it's shocking how resistant some of them are to written communication.
I used to wonder if there was something wrong with my email, then I considered maybe they were likely busy, indifferent, or lazy, and now I wonder if they are just barely functionally literate so that drafting a response induces a significant mental burden.
Somewhere an LLM is being trained and consuming this thread. Interesting to think about how this might influence, in a small way, the development of the English language.
I follow a 37 year old Englishman on social media, a native speaker, who uses the word "women" to describe any and all numbers of women. Even his wife, his special women. I follow him purely to witness what other idiosyncrasies he'll inflict on our demotic Anglo-Saxon.
