What terms/phrases wind you up about losing weight?

Carlos_421 wrote: »

sjaplo wrote: »

Morgaen73 wrote: »

dale050467 wrote: »

using loose instead of lose

English speaking grammer Nazis who seem to assume that everyone who communicates in English speaks English as a first language and must therefore be perfect at it.

I corrected my mistake Herr Generaloberst.

Huh. Loose and lose. See the thing is they are two different words with two different meanings. It's nothing to do with grammar Nazism - because it isn't grammar. The opposite of loose is tight, the opposite of lose is gain. You might as well say " I want to apricot weight" because it makes as much sense.

I bolded your statement because I fail to understand why you took offence to learning something new - if English is indeed a second language for you then you now know the difference and can use either word correctly in the future. "Ich bien ein berliner" if you see what I mean?

I don't think people actually think that "loose" and "lose" are interchangeable or that "loose" is the right word.
I'm pretty sure it's just a simple typo that their spell-checker/autocorrect doesn't fix.

Same with "weigh" vs "weight."
I doubt people would say "I "weight" myself on Mondays" on purpose. It's just that many words that have "gh" at the end also end with a "t" (weight, height, thought, bought, brought, thought, caught...) so when typing "gh" the fingers habitually hit the "t" key. This doesn't happen to me on my phone when typing with my thumbs but on a keyboard I have to go back all the time and remove the unnecessary "t."

This article has lots of interesting speculation on why "loose" is misused so often. While most are specific to "loose", I particularly like the following. To my chagrin, I have caught myself making more spelling errors since I started participating in online forums where misspellings are rampant.

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-confuse-lose-with-loose-or-losing-with-loosing

My guess is that people are not being exposed to as much well-written material as they were before the Internet became their primary source of information. I'm guessing that about 70-90 percent of what we read each day has not been professionally edited.

In "the old days," most, if not all, written material was subject to lots of editing. Books, magazines, newspapers, and advertising are still edited by multiple people before a piece is published. It was relatively rare to see a typo; even today, it's less likely we will see a typo in professionally produced material. (But it seems that this is happening more often as traditional media try to catch up to social media.)

Now, nearly all of what we consume on the Internet via social media and blogs is NOT edited by anyone other than the author, who or may not use a spelling checker. Spelling and grammar checkers don't catch most wrongly used words.

So we are, collectively, exposed to lots of just plain bad writing with poor spelling and misused words. There is no consequence for authors who can't write properly, in fact, there's probably zero correlation to proper grammar and social media popularity.

The only thing that seems to help learn to catch your own errors is to be exposed to LOTs of well-written stuff. The Internet is full of poorly-written stuff. We are, on average, exposed to much more poorly- written stuff than well-written stuff than we were years ago.

And again, even if you are a flawless writer, everyone (myself included) would benefit by having a second (or third) pair of eyes reading our witty tomes before pressing the send button. Such editing is an expensive luxury. Who would you ask to edit your Twitter feed or blog post for you?

And why would you even bother when your grammatically painful writing garners tons of retweets and likes.

SusanMFindlay wrote: »

Morgaen73 wrote: »

dale050467 wrote: »

using loose instead of lose

English speaking grammer Nazis who seem to assume that everyone who communicates in English speaks English as a first language and must therefore be perfect at it.

I corrected my mistake Herr Generaloberst.

My experience has been that, as a general rule, those for whom English is a second language tend to make sloppy mistakes (like "loose" instead of "lose") far less often than those for whom English is a first language.

If I see the mistake once, I assume it's a typo. If I see it repeatedly, I will tend to assume the writer doesn't care unless there are "tells" that the writer is not a native speaker.

I know lots of ESL people and agree with you that sloppy mistakes are more often made by native speakers. An ESL poster on another forum pointed out this reason for native speakers misusing homophones:

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-native-English-speakers-seem-to-confuse-homophones-more-than-non-native-speakers-when-writing

...Yes, you're correct. Native speakers learn the sound of commonly used words (like pronouns) several years before they know how to spell them, so the homophones all initially start out as the same language unit. Trying to separate out the different spellings from that one language unit later in life requires making distinctions where none existed before. People who learn English as a second language tend to encounter the spelling and sound of words at reasonably close to the same time, and most already have different concepts in their brain for the different homophones to map to. For example, a French speaker learning English may associate "here" with "ici" and "hear" with "écouter", so they'd have an easier time keeping track of the difference between the English homonyms than the native English speaker who associates both "here" and "hear" with sound \ˈhir\.

paperpudding wrote: »

I dont get why - if people posted about women would you say females was a dirty word???

kind of, actually. i get this sense from most of the people who use 'female' that they do feel like somehow being subtly more polite or more suave than by just saying 'woman'. if i'm going by social vibe, it's entirely a euphemism.

so that raises the question about what's going on in the mind of a person who doesn't want to say 'woman' out loud: why not? what's wrong with being a woman? what's wrong with letting it be know that yo'uve noticed someone is a woman? how come using a word that semantically points right at the person's reproductive structure seems less jarring to you? because that's what's so weird to me. that's what 'male' and 'female' both do as far as i know. they define whatever they're applied to entirely by their genitals. it's an animal-breeder's word pair.

aside from that, yeah. a person is not just a trait, so when you call someone 'an' any adjective, i find it faintly belittling. the only exception i can think of right now is nationality. i guess 'a canadian' doesn't bother me much because people are the only order of being that we even bother to organize and define in that way. but calling me 'a female' without adding the word 'human' to it is just . . . a female what?

HeliumIsNoble wrote: »

I was going to say, 'to be pedantic for a moment', at the start of this post, and then I realised that implied I had another setting...

Loose is actually already a verb; it's just somewhat archaic at this point. It means... to let go, release. Er, easier to explain in context, probably.

For example:
Legolas loosed his arrows.
We loosed the hounds of war.

yayyyy, a pedantry party. let's cluster in the kitchen where we won't bother the other people.

what's interesting is that we even use 'lose' in the sense of 'lose weight' in the first place. in any other usage i can think of (outside the colloquial), 'lose' carries a negative and unintentional connotation. you lose keys and money. you lose your temper and sometimes your mind. you lose hope. and so on and so on and so forth. but 'lose' weight is neutral at best.

so 'loose' in the archaic sense is almost closer to the spirit of using the phrase. at least in the contexts where it's most common in here. still don't advocate it though. in fact i'm kind of annoyed that i've almost talked my way around to providing a justification for it, when i know perfectly well that most people who say 'loose weight' are merely people who can't or don't bother to spell.