People that want to make me screech my nails on the blackboard...

I'm not the world's best typist, I know. I'm not even a master grammarian. (Although I do appreciate the occasional punctuation joke.) But I'm constantly amazed at the inability of many native-born speakers in this country to handle even some of the simplest aspects of the English language.

Case in point: there's one guy that comes into the local gay.com chatroom (a place in which I hang out far too often) that has a nautical-themed screen name. I'll refrain from naming names. Oh what the hell, he's SailorHere. Now, you'd think with a nickname like that he might know a little bit about sailing. Or even just read something about it. The thing that bugs me is that he's constantly greeting the room with, "AHOY MATTIES." It's even in his bio line.

I don't want to get snippy about the shouting or the lack of a comma because, well, that would be anal. This is a chatroom, after all, and the regular rules of formal language are a bit relaxed. OK, limper than an overcooked noodle. I'm willing to be tolerant of that and the more-than-occasional misspelling; this is conversation, not publication. But it's not a typo, it's always mispelled as "matties," never, not once, as "maties." It doesn't appear to be intentional, he just doesn't know how to spell it.

Is it really unreasonable of me to expect that someone should want to put up a public persona that makes them look like they have more than a fourth-grade education?