A cunning plan that cannot fail
 

Inspiration hit me last night in the shower. Don't you hate it when some idiot starts a thread, but the grammar is so atrocious that it's incomprehensible? I believe I have thought up an answer to that problem. The Stupid-to-English dictionary.

What is the Stupid-to-English dictionary, you ask? A free website where you can copy+paste a moronic post and have a grammatically-correct reply in a few minutes. It would be a free site funded by advertisers. There would be a list of requested translations, and the site would work by offering a pittance (10-25 cents/translation, perhaps) to anyone who translates the stupid to English. Order of translation would be chronological, and the site owners may have to step in occasionally to translate the longer ones. Hopefully, the site will generate enough advertising revenue to pay the translators enough such that the supply of stupid doesn't exceed the demand. It may have to run in the red for about a month, but when people see the explosive popularity of the site, the advertisers will come, and probably start getting competitive. If they're lucky, the owners of the site may even get free hosting in exchange for advertising. Also, the site would have a volunteer-run list of words in stupid and their English equivalents (teh->the, that sort of thing) to better aid the translators.

I couldn't see it taking off. The poor brains of the people who tried to decipher the 'stupid' speak would be insane.

We'd be filling our mental institutions before long with people babbling leet or speaking in typo-language.

Even better. They could work in an enviroment that's safe for them.:)

And your post makes your custom title all the more humorous.

Amen to that, but I'd still like to keep whatever sanity I have left without failing to understand someones gibberish.

I mean, can you imagine how long it would take to work out the various typos for a sentence containing various medicines and illnesses? The humanity!

Well all i have to say is yes I can be one of those people who flip around a word or two. teh = the most peopel can figue out the small word son thir own. as for Leet the basics are actually easy to read such as L33T 3V1L 0\/3r l0rd is not that hard. its actually when you get into the master leet that almost every single letter is a symbol or number of some sort that it can get annoying.

but really it does take common sense to figure out most of the misspells and switched around words.

Not really. People who just can't be bothered to spell or type correctly are slightly annoying. People who are dyslexic, I can forgive.

There is such a thing as a backspace/delete key if you know you've messed up, so some people are just lazy.

My common sense is aplenty. My patience is not.

Well for myself at leats its not due to the fact that i dont try and clean up my post its just reading it over yourself you still miss odd words. and well its not like you have someone over your shoulder proof reading your stuff. that and forums like this dont have a spell check feature so yes there are those who are lazy as heck but then there are htose of us who actually try and spell well we just miss out mistakes.

Yes, but you'll see a BIG difference in the amount of literary-stupidity between someone who's lazy and someone who just missed a typo or two.

Well, let me be the weird one and say: It doesn't bother me either way. As long as I can read it, I don't much care how they spelled things, or where they put their punctuation. I started out caring, but now I..... I've just grown apathetic towards the whole deal.

Really, does it matter? We're not writing essays here. This won't be published, it won't be for a grade. Just as long as a person tries enough that you can understand it, why does it matter?

EDIT: I can see two places where it would be important. Discussion. Its overall business like, and you're discussing serious stuff, so not writing like you are having a seizure is a good thing. But I aviod the place like THE PLAQUE, so it won't bother me much ;)

Other place: Roleplaying. If I understand it correctly, you're writing a story. Stories should look good as well as read well, in my opinion. But I don't have the imagination for that place, so once agian: not bothering me.

I think it's a great idea. I just don't envy the poor bastards who'd be stuck translating. *shudder*

That's just it. Sometimes they don't try hard enough. It's especially frustrating when you're trying to have an intelligent conversation with someone. I, for one, find it hard to take someone seriously if they can't muster the intelligence or willpower to have at least coherent grammar.