I feel loost
November 3rd, 2008 @ 22:42 by NormMonkey
Sometimes I worry that the world will eventually accept “loose” as an alternate spelling of the word “lose”.
At least bob the Angry Flower became a bit of a meme when he tried to teach the world about apostrophes. Whether it worked or not is up in the air.
The war of “lose” to keep its position in the English language is not up in the air. It’s losing. Heh. After all the times I keep seeing it mis-spelt (hah, take *that*, English), it’s weird to see it sitting there spelled properly in my own composition window.
Today I read an otherwise seemingly well written article wherein I encountered this phrase: “This discovery of anabolic frequencies between 20- 50 Hz (at low dB), is a tremendous breakthrough. Astronauts in space loose bone density in zero gravity, and this method could help them maintain healthy bones.”
To see the poor word mis-used in such an otherwise decent setting (we’ll ignore that misplaced comma for the sake of argument, okay?) does not bode well.
Think I’m concerned over nothing, that the English language is robust and will resist this sort of erosion? I used to think that, too. Look what happened, though, to “orient”. All it took was one president with inelegant speaking skills to disorientate the entire world with respect to that word.
I’ve been known to use some flexibility when constructing sentences and phrases, but I do find that kind of misspelling irritating. I don’t often make a big deal about it, though, except to sigh exasperatedly in my own head, since I’ve occasionally even caught myself using the wrong “there” or something I know drives my own self up the wall.
I rather hope, though, the commercially published materials, though, would go through the kind of rigourous checking that should prevent such an error from making it into print.