Comment by dhimes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dhimes | Hacker News Reader

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Totally OT rant here: more and more I'm seeing certain grammatical mistakes crop up that disturb the hell out of me. I understand that the first two 'w's in www are for 'world wide,' and that not everybody is a native speaker of English.

But these things are creeping into native speakers' use also. They are:

1) Confusing the words 'lose' and 'loose.' Lose is the word you use when you mean the opposite of 'find.' It is also used to mean the opposite of 'win.' Loose is something that is the opposite of 'tight.' There is no 'loosing,' (EDIT: a1k0n corrects me here, see his comment below) there is 'loosening,' however, as in what you do to your belt after a large meal. OP makes this error.

2) Using apostrophes for plural. Apostrophes are used to show (a) possession and (b) contraction (leaving letters out of a word). Writing "I'm buying two car's" is incorrect. Replacing your car's winshield wiper blades is ok. So is leaving out the car entirely when drawing a 'toon.

To be even more pedantic: There is 'loosing', as in releasing, but it's probably not what you mean unless you can already spell 'lose'.

My favorite mistake along these lines is "payed", which is a nautical term and not synonymous with "paid".

AFAIK both forms are acceptable [in en_GB] for both the past participles of caulking your boat and making a financial transaction, cf http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pay#English or http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/pay--2.

This IMO highlights why one shouldn't get too anal about specific word forms as long as the intent is apparent. Of course one can generate inaccuracies this way but generally an honest attempt to receive the communicated information doesn't gan aft agley.

I had to look this up and you are correct.

The English language has a lot of quirks where the pronunciation doesn't match the spelling or two words are pronounced the same but are spelled differently. This disparity has been enforced by the school system and media publishing gatekeepers for a long time but now that anybody can publish anything on the net a more loose way of spelling is proliferating. It will probably just get worse over the next few decades.

My favourite is guessing whether there is an s or c in some words, sometimes it feels completely arbitrary. I cannot count how many times I've misspelled 'choice' (actually misspelled it just now but the spell checker caught it).

"It will probably just get worse over the next few decades."

Languages evolve; some of the current "mistakes" will no doubt become new norms. The changes that stick will tend to be those that cause no ambiguity and confusion.

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