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Comment by tomjen2 | Hacker News Reader

Personally I don't care. Unless I am writting a letter to the Queen, I will use lose/loose as I fancy, and I hope no one here will waste a braincell trying to figure out the difference between effect and affect.

Correct grammar is for people who have too much time on their hands.

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> Correct grammar is for people who have too much time on their hands.

Or people who care about expressing themselves clearly.

How do you clearly express the difference between homophones when speaking? It's obviously unnecessary for clear communication. Correct spelling is more generally used to convey educational status.

Correct spelling is more generally used to convey educational status.

...which, like it or not, is often a fairly reliable mental cue for determining how much importance to place on someone's opinion. Clarity is only part of the equation.

Of course, I engage in the practice myself. However, my point was about the subject of the post, homophones. If you have a way of distinguishing them while speaking, they aren't homophones. If you have a way of distinguishing them when writing, you have a poorly constructed phonetic alphabet.

Everytime I see someone misuse lose/loose, it makes me want to kill them with knives. It's important to be precise, you can't just work everything out from context!

Then come up with simple rules (no more than 8 words total) for when to use one or the other.

English has the most moddy grammar of all languages, with so many exceptions and shit - this is one of the things I hope disappear as the world embraces English.

You lose an object; unattached objects are loose.

Which doesn't cover every case I can think of, but demonstrates the difference. Also lose is a verb, loose is (almost always) an adjective.

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