Say it how you here it

I will start this by saying that I have committed my share of mistakes. My favorite was the time that I used the word "qualtiy"...in the release notes for the latest version of my employer's process suite.

Therefore, I'm not linking to the source for this particular mistake:

...encouraging designers to think of content as water, very applicable to the tenants of responsive web design...

The writer should not have used "tenants," but instead should have used "tenets."

I suspect that these errors (and I've committed them myself) happen when we are writing a post in our head and listening to the voices in our head...and perhaps we hear the voice slightly incorrectly. As a result, we spell the word incorrectly.

Spell the word incorrectly? As I noted in a post in my tymshft blog, correct spelling is a convention that has gone in and out of fashion. We have six surviving instances of William Shakespeare's signature, and "Shakespeare" is spelled differently in each one. Recently, variant spellings such as "l8r" have come into vogue.

And while copy editors will not agree, perhaps correct spelling is not as essential as once thought. Consider that I was still able to understand what was being said in the text that I quoted above. And you've probably seen the instances of text that are completely misspelled, but still understandable.

In the business world, your mileage may vary. (I would have said YMMV, but there are probably people who read my blog who have never heard of that acronym.) Some business environments consider correct spelling essential, while sum jest codent care les. It's important to know the rules of your business environment, however. In the same way that you should refrain from wearing your biker pants to most law firm interviews, you probably shouldn't send an "Ima kewl d00d" cover letter to an employer that you know nothing about.