A Public Service Announcement to the whole world

[khyros]

I don't think of myself as a grammar nazi but some things just piss me off. Typographical errors I can live with. However, some people actually don't seem to use or know the word "lose" as distinguished from "loose." And that is the subject of my public service announcement rant

Comments

[thecatinthehat]

This post reminds me of an excercise i wrote in 7th grade, concerning three cats named "there" "their" and "they're".

[ophblekuwufu]

I'd like to point out that you've ended two sentences in this grammatical rant with prepositions.
:-)
Just saying.
-Elisabeth

[timmypowg]

That's a very silly grammatical rule. There's nothing wrong whatever with ending sentences with prepositions; it's just an inverted sentence structure that allows the person making it to express his or her subjects and objects in a natural manner, thus improving comprehension. The rule only makes writing harder, because (by the way, I spell it "beacuse" all the time, and sometimes I don't catch the mistake) it requires one to use needless pronouns as placeholders. Taking "This is the rabbit this story is about," we have the following. We have a THING -- revealed to be a rabbit -- that is under consideration and has already been under consideration because we're essentially pointing to it with "this". Now we want to modify the rabbit by letting the audience know that this story -- also already under consideration, given "this" -- is about the rabbit. The possible fixes are very ugly: "This is the rabbit about which this story is," or, introducing some new modifying verb, "This is the rabbit about which this story was written."

[silkspinner]

Hmm, but they're both prepositions which are really part of the verb (there's a formal word for this, but I don't recall it), so I'm not sure he loses points...

[khyros]

SWEET!

[dumble]

Do people actually mix up the meanings of the words, or just the spellings? As far as I can remember, I've never heard someone say "loose" when they mean "lose" (or vice versa): it's just a problem that shows up in writing. That suggests to me that it's a spelling problem, rather than a meaning problem. Of course, people would still do well to learn the correct spelling of "lose", but maybe it will annoy you less to think of it in this different light? (And you've got to admit, spelling is hard! Personally, I think "loose" looks like just as good a spelling as "lose" for a word pronounced [luz].)

[khyros]

It's a spelling issue, but

1) It's not like we're dealing with really complicated words here!

2) Misspellings that aren't the result of laziness, and in fact require more effort to create than spelling a word correctly seem to me to be particularly grievous.

3) When a spelling error transmutes one word into another, this substantially hinders comprehension, much more than "cieling" for "ceiling" or something like that.

When something hinders my comprehension I focus on it to understand, and I just imagine someone actually saying that, and I am struck with the fact that they sound like a mouth-breathing idiot, especially when it happens more than once in a message.

[dumble]

1) Speak for yourself! They may not be long, but, as I mentioned before, I think the spellings are quite unintuitive! In fact, the way I type "lose" is often l-o-o-pause-backspace-s-e

[khyros]

1) Complicated/Arcane/Unintuitive... terminology issue. Fine, it's subjective.

2) I wouldn't advocate looking it up. I'd advocate knowing the language well enough to not NEED a dictionary for that.

That it would happen more than once in a message isn't surprising: in that case, it's clear that the writer really doesn't know how to spell "lose", but that doesn't mean that he doesn't know the difference between the two words, and it certainly doesn't make him an idiot.

So, maybe other people have an easier time divorcing the process of deriving meaning from written language from the sound of hearing the writing read than I do. It's not easy for me, which, I think, is part of why it's/its bothers me less than this (see another response). I don't think it makes him an idiot... but it makes him "sound" like one to me.

A quick note about spelling would probably fix the problem. Turning it into a rant about meaning is attributing far more ignorance to the writer than he has actually demonstrated.This is what LJ is for, no? ;) Hence

[ophblekuwufu]

It seems analogous to me to "it's" in a possessive usage (also a very common error). It's a reasonable spelling for the word, and you know you've seen that spelling somewhere, so you use it. "Lose" is if anything counterintuitive-- I think one would naturally expect that to be pronounced "lowz". In fact, I can't off hand think of any other word in which "ose" is pronounced that way

[dumble]

My own impression is that both spelling and grammar are quite arbitrary. In particular, the more I learn about linguistics the more I realize how arbitrary grammar is. This is particularly true if you take "grammar" in the popular sense, as including aspects of usage and style, as opposed to in the stricter sense, just meaning syntax. This trend towards seeing it as arbitrary is ironic, given that what I'm most interested in studying is regularity in language. But the first thing I had to realize when I got interested in seriously studying linguistics was that a lot of the supposedly logical rules you're taught in English class are basically made up because they sound logical, but they don't reflect the way anyone actually talks or ever did talk. Once you get passed those, there certainly seem to be real rules underlying grammar, but they're complicated enough that syntacticians still don't agree on what they are (or, for that matter, whether they actually exist in they way we think they do), despite being hard at work on precisely

[khyros]

English does have words that are spelled the same way and mean different things, and I think were this one of them, none of us would suffer for it.

But it's not one of them! Doesn't that MATTER? ::sigh::

It's/its bothers me less (and I am guilty of messing that one up for sure) partially because they are phonemically identical. That one is my Dad and Uncle's pet peeve.

[lokei]

Having myself subjected my seventh graders to a twenty minute lesson on the difference between 'less' and 'fewer,' I am happy to back anyone who insists on proper grammar and/or spelling, in any situation. As a former teacher, current writer, and sometime copy-editor, I have a list of peeves about half a mile long, and I think it's entirely reasonable to expect that especially in a business context, people should make an effort to use proper grammar and spelling. I think the carelessness with which people treat the English language is a result of growing up with spell-check and an overfamiliarity with netspeak and a dearth of appreciation for truly interesting and intricate prose. Yes, the English language is changing and convoluted and counterintuitive, but if one is a native English speaker, it's just lazy and disrespectful not to use it properly.

(Was that enough back-up, Vash?)

[khyros]

HAI! Nice support!