Is it confusing? Or were you able to tell from context what the user meant? I suspect, given the language ability you've displayed here, that you had no trouble discerning the meaning the user was attempting to convey.
Language is not a series of rules to follow, it's a loose confederecy of conventions we used with each other to get our point across.
True. But what do we gain in the meantime by quibbling over typographical errors? Did anyone really read this fellow's comment and go, 'wait, what? That doesn't make any sense. I can't make heads or tails of this person's sentence.'I have hard time believing so. And, if the situation is as the parent comment described --- 'this error is made consistently upstream' -- then we're looking at the collapse of loose/lose probably in the same timeframe as 'they're/their/there' and 'to/too/two'.
My main point is that language is not a static set of do's and don't's. It lives. If you need someone to clarify, ask them! But pointing your teacher's baton at them and saying, 'you're using your language wrong' is a waste of life.
But, then again, I'm sure this user will never "misspell" (an hilarious notion, given how recently spelling was standardized to start!) that word again, so perhaps my fervor has backfired.
Nothing. There wasn't really a reason for whoever pointed it out to do so. On one hand it's a common error, so it's very noticeable—but on the other, it's a common error, so people know what was really meant.
> And, if the situation is as the parent comment described --- 'this error is made consistently upstream' -- then we're looking at the collapse of loose/lose probably in the same timeframe as 'they're/their/there' and 'to/too/two'.
Yeah, that seems reasonable. One thing your other examples have going for them, though, is that if you use the incorrect spelling, it's (almost) always obvious from context which is correct, but I can imagine there are more situations that lose and loose could both be correct.
> My main point is that language is not a static set of do's and don't's. It lives. If you need someone to clarify, ask them! But pointing your teacher's baton at them and saying, 'you're using your language wrong' is a waste of life.
Agreed 100%
> so perhaps my fervor has backfired.
Meh. I see so many "they is always plural!" or "literally meaning figuratively is a recent error!" or "language never changes!" or other prescriptive garbage, that it's a nice change of pace to see someone a bit too far on the descriptive side :-)
As such, the only way language could change to accommodate this usage would be if "loose" became an alternate spelling for "lose". Whether the verb "loose" makes sense in context is neither here not there - it's not what the speakers were trying to say.
The comment I replied to mentioned that the mistake had been made "consistently upstream" -- I took this to mean that he has seen this mistake made multiple times by multiple people, which would indicate an alternate spelling has emerged, or that the two words have come to be spelled the same way.
And the comment about loose as a verb was a reference to the fact that the correction was not even necessary -- we can all get by with each other's occasional errors in typing. In this case, the error was so minor it didn't even affect the meaning of the sentence.
I'm a firm believer in avoiding any correction to adult speech, typing or spoken. People will use/abuse/misspell words no matter what, and pointing them out is merely an exercise in self-superiority.
"I've seen this happen many times" doesn't mean a new spelling has emerged, by several orders of magnitude. If my pals and I decided to go wander around online forums, spelling "fish" with -sch, that wouldn't make it magically correct.
It wouldn't make it standard, but I argue that if the person you mean to receive the message recieves it using that combination of letters, what's considered "correct" by x number of people is irrelevant.
Hence "correcting" someone when you knew what they meant is absurd.
"Loose loose situation" doesn't mean anything. People understood the meaning because they could guess what error had been made, not because the two words are so similar as to be interchangeable.
I've decided that "to release" means "aardvark" which is a noun. So no verb "loose."