Come on people....BASS!

...yeah, but on an audiophile site...you just don't misspell "bass".
That's just a no-no.
You can misspell everything else, but not "bass".

...I cringe every time I see "base"....arggghhh!

I've seen college kids text using no caps or punctuation of any kind except maybe, a period along with many mis-spelled words. But then my grammar is far from perfect.

The reason you are seeing this is they spent their youth, or rather came up through their youth..via texting. Texting keyboards require far too much effort for most to bother to punctuate properly.

It's a dead giveaway (when reading a text of mine) that I was an adult when texting became mainstream, as I do the extra work of punctuation and use all the extra characters that are on the second layer beyond the basic qwerty.

I admit that having to do things correctly stops me from texting at all. I won't willingly misspell and use punctuation incorrectly and I don't want the extra effort of dealing with this micro miniature keyboard crap, so I simply don't text.

The first company to address this issue in a simple easily utilized and intuitive way, will probably win the next bout of smart phone sales wars. Perhaps some company already has.

I don't like 'dumbing down' phones, so I stay away from them. I talk with people. I call them. I speak with them in person. I sit at computers and compose emails.

I had to interview job candidates for my company not long ago.   And writing is involved - being able to describe the products on the website for potential buyers.  As part of the interview I gave all candidates a 10 word spelling exam, nothing too difficult, words like "dimensions", "beautiful", "large", "pictures", etc.   If memory serves, 90%+ of the candidates were recent ASU graduates in non-engineering disciplines.     I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that if you saw the results, you'd think the spelling test had been administered to a group of non-English-speaking Albanian exchange students.   It was like that comedy movie "Idiocracy" happening right there in the interviews.

My biggest person online pet peeve is the word "lose", as in the opposite of "to find".   Somewhere along the way, that word gained an extra "o" and if you don't win you're a "looser".  

Regarding misuse of apostrophes I of course agree, but on occasion I (and perhaps others) have chosen to take a bit of poetic license and do that intentionally, in order to avoid possible confusion as to whether the "s" is part of a tube type designation or model name which precedes it.

But to add to the commonly seen incorrect word substitutions that have been mentioned, on a percentage basis I would have to say that among the leaders are requests for or offerings of "advise" instead of "advice."

And of course "your" instead of "you’re."

Regards,
-- Al

+1 teo_audio. I always thought that emails were the biggest enemy of true communication until texting came along. Probably why they invented emoji to try to add clarity of intent to an otherwise easily misinterpreted written comment stripped of inflection and verbal cues for the sake of minimal effort.

Are we really that busy with matters of importance that a phone call is too ponderous in order to ensure the meeting of the minds?

Dave