The confusion about lose and loose just came out of nowhere about ten years ago. Before that no one confused the two. Now the problem is everywhere and it really annoys me.
I read a note written by a teacher last week who did it. Something about funding and he wrote, “If we don’t do this we will loose the money...” ARRGH! It did come around 10 years ago, I don’t know why. I think the best I ever read was on one forum these two guys where exchanging nasty posts at one another, and one guy wrote “Are you a little lose in the head or something? Why don’t you shut up looser!” LOL!
Me, too. I just want to reach through the screen and strangle the people who make that mistake.
It must be a result of the “whole language” reading method where kids were never taught to correctly sound out words using phonetics or to diagram sentences.
Maybe the problem was there for many years and we just didn’t see it. Before the Internet, you didn’t read the ramblings of thousands of semi-literates. Now even you and I have our wisdom preserved for all posterity.
I’m not sure.
I’ve been writing creatively, as well as through very extensive personal correspondence, all of my life; and I found that upon the transition from writing on paper - or even on an old-fashioned typewriter - to writing on the Internet, the tendency to confuse homophones greatly increased in Internet writings. I first noticed this on Usenet more than 20 years ago; people whose educations and erudition were apparent would frequently make those same mistakes.
I think some ‘brain-thing’ happens, or is different, when writing to the internet/on a computer, even with people who, for instance, clearly know the difference between ‘who’s’ and ‘whose’.
I’m not sure why it’s true; but my ‘working hypothesis’ is that “talking” to one another, in the way that we are doing now, is more like ‘speech’ than it is like ‘writing’. Our brains are getting confused by the conflation of two different means of communication.
-JT
“breath” and “breathe” are another pair...