Proper spelling really is important

[Theophylact]

(at least, if you're selling something on eBay.)

One unofficial survey — an hour's search for creative spellings — turned up dozens of items, including bycicles, telefones, dimonds, mother of perl, cuttlery, bedroom suits and loads of antiks.

[snip]

Some experts say there is no evidence that people are spelling worse than they ever did. But with the growth of e-mail correspondence and instant messaging, language has grown more informal. And much as calculators did for arithmetic, spell checkers have made good spelling seem to quite a number of people like an obsolete virtue.

Not that spell checkers are used by nearly everyone. Indeed, experts say the Internet — with its discussion boards, blogs and self-published articles — is a treasure trove of bad spelling.

[snip]

Henry Gomez, vice president for corporate communications at eBay, said the company did not generally hear from sellers who misspell, and had no way of gauging how many sales might have involved misspelled listings.

But some sellers clearly bear in mind the potential for disaster when preparing their advertisements. Warren Lieu of Houston, who was selling hunting and fishing knives on eBay recently, covered all the bases: his listing advertised every sort of alphabetic butchery, including knifes and knive.

Mr. Lieu, a computer programmer, keeps a list of common misspellings, including labtop for laptop and Cusinart for Cuisinart.

His strategy of listing multiple spellings, he said, is based on his experience as a buyer. "I'm a bad speller myself," he said. So his mistakes in searching for items led him to realize that he could buy up bargains.

"I'd go ahead and deliberately misspell it when I searched for items," he said.

[nomaxim]

Saw a similar article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer this morning.
Some guy bought watch 'gers' for two bucks. He then turned around and sold watch 'gears' for $200.

[Beemer]

I'm not a great speller myself so what I do is type out what I want to say on a thread, swipe and copy what I typed, bring up Microsoft Word and paste. I let Word show me the spelling errors and I correct them with Word's suggestions or alter the spelling as I see fit.

Cheers!

[osprey4]

I wuz wuderin why that antik wach wuznt seling on ebay.

...treasure trove of bad spelling...

[tmx468]

Eh? U don fink dat modern spellin is a bad fing doU?

[MTAtech]

Yup, I've picked up great bargains on Manolta and Cannon cameras.

[tmx468]

I used to own a great value Sonny Walkman

[lost-and-found]

Have you ever tried Son OS?

[Bovon]

I use spell checkers regularly. IESpell for Internet Explorer and another spell checker for Outlook Express. But, neither one does a dang thing for my grammar!

[Brainchild]

Yup, you can pick up some good deals on mikrofones,simbols,and standes on ebay.
Saved myself a fortune

I spell pretty well,and my grammer is OK, but my typing sure could use some workI'm glad they made the backspace button