Hey Internet, stop making me stupid!

Loose. Look at that word. That word makes me very uncomfortable now.  I know it shouldn’t. It can’t help it, after all it’s just a word. Looking at the Oxford English Dictionary the definition is: Loose ~ Not firmly or tightly fixed in place; detached or able to be detached; not held or tied together or contained within something. Plus a few extra definitions relating to sport or clothing.

However there’s also a single line, listed under the usage heading on the definition page, which refers directly to what makes me so uncomfortable about this word: The words loose and lose are different and should not be confused.

Someone should tell that to the Internet.

I don’t think a day goes by where I don’t come across the word lose spelled, er, loosely. I think I can understand why, the word is pronounced with a long O sound like pool or food. But then there are plenty of words which are pronounced similarly that only have a single O like prove or lose. Which is great until you remember that English is an anarchic mess of a language which contains the following words: croup, shrewd, suit, ewe, you, fucking luge, cue, queue, shoe, and rue. The long oo sound is not consistent in its spelling.

All this is starting to have a strange effect on me. I’m a pedantic sod at the best of times. A total grammar fascist the rest of the time. Seriously. The amount of restraint it takes to stop me screaming on the Internet at people for not proofreading blogs, news articles or even twitter posts is heroic. Most of the time I can just about forget the grammatical horrors I’ve seen, but the lose/loose error is starting to haunt my mind.

I can’t read the word now. So many people (most natural English speakers so they’ve no fucking excuse) are spelling it wrong that I’m now second guessing the word when I see it. If I read loose in a sentence I’m hearing lose in my head.  Mentally correcting this seemingly small error is ruining my online experience. It’s so common now that even when loose is used correctly I just assume it’s a mistake. It’s an effect so strong it often takes me a sentence or two to pick up the correct context again and reset to the correct definition.

I don’t want to accept this. I shouldn’t have to.

So this is my plea to the Internet. Stop making me dumb. Take some pride in your spelling. Read what you write before you hit post (seriously, most tools and web platforms even proofread for you) and above all fix these simple mistakes:

Lose is not Loose.
Your is not the same as you’re.
Lego doesn’t have an s on the end under any circumstances.
But maths does (as it’s short for mathematics).
Affect changes something, effect is the result of the change itself.