Lo-osely Speaking...

Ladies and gentlemen,boys and girls, children of all ages, I shall today enlighteno you about one of my pet peeves.

Couple of things before that.

Call me neanderthal but I like any language to be written in the correct way only. Using 'u' instead of you, 'wud' instead of would is generally quite irritating to me. But even though I may grimace at it, I have made my peace with these common words. So much so that I can sometimes be found actually using them, especially when I'm chatting with someone. My aversion to abridged words also means that text messages are more like essay type writing. The number of texts running into two (or more!) messages that I write must be some sort of record. But still I like my long proper english text messages. However, when I receive shortened messages I sometimes feel that I may be moving a generation too slow. Half the time I have trouble figuring out what exactly has been written (and and no punctuation at all! How do you figure where one sentence is ending and the next beginnning? Don't they realize that the entire meaning of the sentence may change??!). And the other half I'm seething at the murder of the language.

But no matter. Even this I shall forgive, reluctantly. But my biggest pet peeve which has me literally tearing my hair out and gnashing my teeth is something different. And its so universal that I've seen it in client presentations, other presentations, in the writings of some of my favourite writers and bloggers, in newspapers - hell, every freakin' where.

It's the wrong usage of lose and loose. So 'I hope you didn't loose', instead of being a comforting expression of concern from a friend becomes a teeth gnashing, hair pulling, irritation inducing line. Aaargghh its as irritating as when you run your nails on a blackboard, or slide a spoon's edge hard against a steel vessel. And I'm not kidding about the widespread misuse of these two words. In fact only this morning I saw this in a presentation. Maybe I notice this a lot more than usual because I seriously get pissed off with this error.

Come on people, is it so difficult to understand? If some one has won a game against you - you LOSE. And if your jeans are falling off, they're LOOSE.

How difficult is it to get it? Jesus, I'll surely loose my mind at this rate...