Why is it in the past 2 years the confusion over which to use seems to be on the rise?

I just saw "loosing" used twice in a huge mailout by a respectable web company when they really meant "losing".

Ugh.

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"In a world of illusion you only see what you feel"

because loosing sounds better.

and also because people can't spell now-a-days, so they rely on spellcheckers, and unfortunately loosing is a real word.

This is what happened after the 70's... people started loose their standards j/k

Seriously now: unfortunately, spoken language is quite different from the written language because while one evolves, the other is a lot more conservative. This is extremely common in English. I don't know if native speakers feel this difficulty, but English is a very hard language when it comes to spelling because hardly consonants and vowels have a "fixed" form (e.g. "go" should rhyme with "do", but it doesn't; and the letter "g" in the word "go" is not the same as in the word "rough").

This is what leads to this kind of mistake. People usually look for a way to get the written language closer to the spoken language. By the way, this whole speech is based on the fact that I believe that "lose" and "loose" are pronounced the same way: if they're not, forget what I'm talking about

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Poppycock, we're not talking about foreigners struggling with the spelling, we're talking about native English speakers who are too feckin' lazy to proofread their work.

I can't count the number of times I've seen "there" in place of "their" or "they're" - and especially in the latter case, come on, you know that something must be wrong when there's no apostrophe (>> ' << for those who've yet to learn what that is) in it. Speaking of which, therein lie the ones that type out words like "dont" and "whats". It's actually a really serious and problematic situation, we now have universities with swarms of students who truly can't string together a sentence, and they don't know what to do with them.

It's a combination of laziness, lack of education & proper reading, and over-exposure to the horribly mangled Internet chat lingo.

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inersting topic.

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quote:

Originally posted by Clyde77 inersting topic.

^ lol, that was a joke I hope??

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2048-06-66 - Spastic & Whocares ¶ Although I'm Actually Flattered
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quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut It's a combination of laziness, lack of education & proper reading, and over-exposure to the horribly mangled Internet chat lingo.

If it makes you feel any better, it doesn't happen only in English And if you ask me, I still blame the writing system more than the people who mispell the words... the Latin alphabet was developed for a language that doesn't even exist anymore. If it's not that good for my native language (Portuguese, which is neo-latin language), how can it be suitable for a language like English?

In fact, when was the last spelling reform in English? Anyone got a clue?

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loosing is a verb too though

I agree with you in theory Maaz, and I tend to be very patient with non-native speakers... but as for the natives, I don't have any particular talent for languages and I don't read a lot of books yet I have no trouble, so I guess I can't really see what's so difficult. I think it's just that people don't care whether or not their spelling or grammar is correct - they figure their message will come across anyway, and if it doesn't, it's the other person's fault for not understanding them properly.

But hey that's just me. Maybe there's something I'm missing.

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My party schedule:
2009-02-21 - DJ Attention @ I'm So Popular
2009-06-18 - DJ Annoying @ People Need To Know Where I'll Be
2012-11-32 - DJ Insufferable ɸ Or At Least the Stalkers I Complain About
2048-06-66 - Spastic & Whocares ¶ Although I'm Actually Flattered
9999-45-81 - Tweaker Gimp ☼ I Probably Won't Even Go To This But I Have To Make Sure I Fill Up All The Available Space Here

People have been misspelling since the inception of writing, as well as failing to use proper conventions and sentence structure (like this sentence for example is poorly structured). It has more to do with the fact that the internet is an informal communication medium, then with the fact some people are clueless.

If i were writing a letter to somebody I wanted to "look good" to, I would be sure to at least try and correct as many spelling errors as I could. I find spellcheck to be a horrible way to "proofread" your work as more often then not your sentence structure is suffering more than your spelling, or at least that is how it works for me.

People who are spelling zealots on messageboards tend to irritate me a slight bit. Sure sometimes it's fun to take a stab at somebody's typo, but just as long as it conveys the meaning, what is the problem. Sentence structure is far more of a problem in comprehension.

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quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut But hey that's just me. Maybe there's something I'm missing.

hehe, it's just a different point of view. Some people view the language grammatically. Others see it phonetically.
When some writes "There coming", that's because it sounds like "They're coming" so (s)he supposes it can be understood. However, if you read things gramatically, it becomes an illogical sentence.

I guess I'd better go to sleep before I sound to confusing even for myself

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