English & Spelling 101

There's a certain pet peeve of mine that keeps poking me in the eye on a fairly regular basis these days.  It shows up frequently on facebook, in text messages, and in papers written by fourth graders.

It's called misused words and poor spelling.

For example, uses of words that sound the same and are spelled differently can trip us up.  I'm guilty of this myself at times when I'm not paying attention.  One such set of words:  there, their, and they're.

There is a location.  Their refers to people.  They're is the combination of "they" and "are." 
Bad example:  There going to take they're stuff over their. 
Correct example:  They're going to take their stuff over there.

Another set of troublesome words:  your and you're.  Again, your refers to people.  You're is the combination of "you" and "are."
Bad example:  Stop your at 1/2 price fireworks!
Correct example:  Stop!  You're at 1/2 price fireworks!

One thing teachers encouraged us to do as we first learned to string letters together into words was to "sound it out."  For the most part, this is a very useful tool when trying to spell a tricky word.  Kids (and adults) still do this, and that's a very good thing.  The downfall here isn't in our lack of ability to spell as it is in our lack of ability to speak properly.  As these younger generations become more and more adept at communicating via text and facebook and twitter, they use their elementary skills of sounding out our lazily-spoken words.  Then we end up with slang words that aren't even in the dictionary, and for whatever reason, this really gets under my skin.

The culprit I see over and over again:  probably.

Honestly, we talk so fast that it's a chore to pronounce the entire word.  (There are a few other words I know that I get lazy with, just as a disclaimer to hopefully sound slightly less incriminating.)  But with our lazy enunciations comes lazy spellings, and then we end up with the following digression of the word:

Probly
Prolly
Proll
Problblay

That last one is my favorite.  A fair attempt at sounding it out without removing syllables...done by an adult.

One final new favorite:  brother.  A common term of endearment used between men and boys, it also has quite the evolutionary process.  See below.

Brother
Brotha
Bro'

But one young man recently took this to a new level.  A written conversation with his buddy went as follows (see if you can find the newest evolutionary species):

Boy 1:  what a star
Boy 2:  I know right?
Boy 1:  yeah bra you are

Not a great title for a 13 year-old boy...but for some odd reason no one seemed to even notice this nickname-turned-noun.

So there's my English lesson for today.  I realize nothing is going to change just because I poked fun.  But I feel a little better after letting off some pent-up steam.  Why there was steam pent-up over the issue in the first place...
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By the way, as a friend of mine was proof-reading this post for me, she so very kindly pointed out a rather comprehensive list of words that I apparently misspell on a regular basis (including but not limited to:  alter, desparate, and one other word she can't remember but will leave in the comments below as soon as thinks of it).