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Millennials are annoyed when your grammar’s not on fleek

Millennials at the Citizen M Hotel in New York. A new report shows millennials are sticklers for grammar.

Millennials at the Citizen M Hotel in New York. A new report shows millennials are sticklers for grammar.

(Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times)
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Millennials can’t even with your bad grammar and spelling.

That’s according to a poll conducted by Harris for Dictionary.com, which found that 74% of Americans ages 18 to 34 are annoyed by grammar and spelling mistakes on social media, the Associated Press reports.

That makes millennials the generation most likely to see red when your grammar’s not on fleek. The poll also found that women are more likely than men to notice grammar and spelling errors in writing.

Liz McMillan, the CEO of Dictionary.com, said that millennials’ famous love of technology hasn’t made them immune from being irritated at linguistic slip-ups. “While we’d assume they’d be accustomed to seeing and using abbreviated speech and lingo because they are a tech-savvy generation, we actually found that they have much higher standards,” she told AP.

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The finding that younger people have zero chill when it comes to improper grammar flies in the face of common stereotypes of millennials. The top definition of “millennial” on the website Urban Dictionary slams members of Generation Y for their supposed inattention to language: “They believe themselves to be highly intelligent, the teachers and lecturers constantly gave them A’s in order to keep Mom and Dad from complaining to the Dean. Unfortunately, nobody explained to them the difference between an education and grade inflation so they tend to demonstrate poor spelling and even poorer grammar.”

(The first sentence of that definition, unfortunately for its author, contains a comma splice, and “dean” should be lowercased, but, hey, nobody’s perfect.)

Perhaps Americans shouldn’t be surprised that millennials think grammar is bae. A recent Pew Research Center study found that the under-30 set is more likely to read books than their Generation X and baby boomer counterparts.

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