This handy comparison was originally introduced to me by Logan Shaw, and it bears repeating:
Whose? Mine, yours, his, hers, ours, theirs, its
Who’s? I’m, you’re, he’s, she’s, we’re, they’re, it’s
Please take note of the emphasis in the above: it’s there for a reason.
Homophones are in fact trivial to master, though you wouldn’t know it by what passes for prose on the Internet. I am tempted to suspect that those who confuse, for example, “they’re/there/their” are deliberately inconveniencing their audience for the sake of shirking a few minutes of learning, but of course one should not attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance. I find it difficult to accept that they’re unaware of the distinction, but there you are.
The last time I wrote against the abuse of language on the Internet, I was showered with enthusiastic, if atrociously written, complaints. I don’t flatter myself to think that this post will achieve the same notoriety, but just in case I remind my readers that sloppily-written comments will be deleted with neither explanation nor remorse.
This kind of stuff has always bothered me. I vaguely remember starting to learn this stuff in maybe grade two or three. I remember that it was hammered on for all of elementary school, and repeated at least yearly until grade 12. Even punctuation for dummies (engineering english) mentioned and harped on this.
How, after a decade of repetition, can people still get this wrong? Perhaps more significantly, how can we trust these people to perform any meaningful function in society doing tasks that they were introduced to far more recently?